An inside job like this where the cards are primed for a scam before they hit the shelves can not effectively be defended against otherwise. Clerks may not allow you to do this at every store. At the very least you MUST open the card and inspect its digits, date, CVV, and ID before you pay for it at the POS. My conclusion here is that it is basically unsafe to purchase Visa Vanillas cards now. Upon doing some searching it seems clear that these cards are arriving TO THE STORES in this condition. The packaging is good, it is tamper proof.ĭespite no evidence of tampering, the card had been demagnetized on the strip, and the CVV was scratched off completely. If you know about VV packaging then the notion that someone is opening them up, modifying the cards (why even do this? just write down the details) and sealing them back up makes no sense. I recently purchased a VV card and clearly inspected the packaging to look for evidence of tampering and stickers. An example of this is here:īut now there is a new scam that I don't believe we can defend against because the evidence points to an inside job by someone working in the manufacturing of the cards. If you google visa vanilla sticker scam you will see many stories about this. This scam can be detected by looking for signs of a sticker and tampering in general. Only purchase the second type of VV cards ( ).īut this is where the second scam comes in, and is the better known 'sticker scam' where thieves will place a sticker over the card ID so that when it's scanned at checkout the money is loaded onto their card and not yours. So, these types of cards are by definition unsafe to purchase. Curiously, in the 'one vanilla' type packaging this verification system does not exist. Note where it tells you in red to 'check that the underlined portion of this number matches the number below'.

This is the 'usual' type of packaging that alerts you to this: In this packaging, you cannot verify that the card ID on the packaging that is scanned to activate matches the ID that is actually printed on the card. The first type of scam involves a strange packaging type that looks like this: In the past, there have been 2 types of VV scams I've seen that could be defended against. Lost some money today on a Visa Vanilla card and wanted to alert this community.

Visa vanilla