Gift cards considered harmful?

Through John Gruber’s article at Daring Fireball, Gift Card database, an Australian website that tracks, well, gift cards has a fantastic guide to spotting when a physical gift card may have been tampered with.

This is a rising problem where scammers tamper with a physical gift card in a store so that it is activated when you purchase the card but you are unable to redeem the money loaded onto the card, leaving them able to do so at their leisure.

There have been cases where people have lost access to their Apple/Xbox/Google account after becoming the innocent victim of scammers. At this point, I have to wonder if I’d dare redeem a gift card as I don’t know for sure if it is ‘safe’. This could be the start of the death of buying physical gift cards in stores.