My Mom Gave a Scammer Gift Card Numbers. Can I Get the Money Back?

TL;DR

• Call the gift card company before you do anything else, because any money still sitting on the card can sometimes be frozen.
• The FTC publishes direct fraud numbers for Apple, Amazon, Target, Walmart, Google Play, Visa and others, and you should use those instead of general customer service.
• People reported losing $212 million to gift card and reload card scams in 2024 across more than 41,000 reports to the FTC.
• File at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and get a police report, since some retailers and insurers will not act without one.
• Expect a follow-up contact promising to recover the money, and treat that as a second scam, not a rescue.

Your mom called you, or you found the receipts, or she finally told you after two days of not sleeping. She read the numbers off the back of a stack of gift cards to someone on the phone. Maybe it was the IRS. Maybe it was Microsoft, or her bank’s fraud department, or a grandchild in jail.

You want to know one thing right now: is the money gone, and can you get it back?

Sometimes. It depends almost entirely on how fast you move and whether the scammer has already spent the balance. Here is the order to do things in.

Call the gift card company first, not the store, not the bank

The card number and PIN are the money. Once a scammer redeems them into an account, the balance is transferred and there is nothing left to freeze. That usually happens within minutes of the call. Not always, though. Scammers sometimes sit on card numbers for hours, and they sometimes buy cards in batches and drain them unevenly.

That gap is the only real recovery window you have, so use it before you do anything else.

Get the physical cards and the store receipts in front of you. The receipt matters because it proves the purchase amount and the date, and some issuers will not open a case without it. If your mom threw the cards away, check the trash. If she took a photo of them for the scammer, that photo is in her Photos app.

Then call.

Who to call, by card type

These are the fraud lines the FTC publishes on its gift card scams page. Skip the general customer service menu and use these.

Apple or iTunes: 1 (800) 275-2273. Say “gift card” to get a live representative. Ask whether the balance is still on the card, and ask for a freeze.

Amazon: 1 (888) 280-4331.

Target: 1 (800) 544-2943.

Walmart: 1 (888) 537-5503.

Visa gift cards: 1 (800) 847-2911.

American Express: 1 (877) 297-4438.

Best Buy: 1 (888) 237-8289.

Google Play: report through Google’s gift card scam form, which works even without a Google account.

Vanilla: 1 (833) 322-6760. ReloadIt: 1 (888) 633-9434. MoneyPak: file a fraud claim at secure.moneypak.com/report-fraud. Steam and eBay: report through their support chat.

If the card is not on that list, the issuer’s contact info is printed on the card itself.

What to say when someone picks up

Be short and specific. Long stories get you transferred.

“I need to report gift card fraud. I have the card number and the store receipt. Can you tell me if there is a balance remaining, and can you freeze it?”

Then ask the second question, which most people skip: “Can I get a refund?” The FTC’s guidance says plainly to ask, because some companies do return money. It is not a policy you can count on and it is not something they volunteer. Ask anyway, and ask for a case or reference number before you hang up.

Do this even if the scam happened weeks ago. The FTC’s instruction is to report it no matter how long it has been.

Then file the reports, in this order

ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Takes about ten minutes. This is the database that feeds FTC enforcement and the Consumer Sentinel Network that law enforcement searches. In 2024, gift card and reload card payments showed up in 41,120 fraud reports totaling $212 million in reported losses, according to the FTC’s 2024 Consumer Sentinel Data Book.

A local police report. Call the non-emergency line. Some retailers and some insurance policies will not process a fraud claim without a report number, and if the loss was large enough to matter for taxes or a civil claim later, you want the paper.

The AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline, 877-908-3360. Free, open to anyone regardless of age or membership, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern. Trained specialists walk through what to do next. If your mom is the kind of person who will listen to a stranger before she listens to her own child, this call is worth more than anything you say at the kitchen table.

Be honest with her about the odds

Most gift card money does not come back. Say that out loud, kindly, early. The alternative is that she spends the next three weeks waiting on a refund that never arrives, and that waiting is exactly the state of mind the next scammer is looking for.

What she should hear from you: we did everything that could be done, we did it fast, and now we are protecting what is left.

The next call is the one that will actually hurt

Scammers keep lists. Once someone pays with gift cards, their number goes into a file marked “this one pays,” and it gets sold. The FTC put out a fresh alert on this in August 2026 warning people who lost money to scams to watch for anyone claiming they can get it back.

So expect a call. It will be from a “fraud recovery specialist,” or a “federal investigator assigned to your case,” or someone who already knows the amount she lost and which cards she bought, because that information came from the first crew. They will ask for a fee, or taxes, or more gift cards.

There is no legitimate service that charges an upfront fee to recover scam losses. We wrote about how that second wave works in Already Been Scammed? Here’s What to Do, and the Recovery Scam Coming Next.

Tell her now, before the call comes, so she recognizes it when it does.

Now deal with the phone itself

Almost all of this starts with a ringing phone. FTC data from August 2025 found that among older adults who reported losing $10,000 or more to business and government imposter scams in 2024, 41% said the first contact was a phone call. Those same reports show the problem accelerating: from 2020 to 2024, the number of older adults reporting losses over $100,000 to these scams rose nearly sevenfold.

The scammer’s whole method depends on keeping someone on the line, alone, moving fast, with no time to call a family member who would hear the story and say wait, that’s not how the IRS works.

So the fix is not really a lecture about scams. It’s fewer of those calls connecting in the first place.

Go through her iPhone settings this week. Settings, then Phone, then turn on Silence Unknown Callers so anything not in her contacts goes to voicemail. Then Settings, Messages, Filter Unknown Senders. Both are free and both help, and both have real gaps, mostly around spoofed numbers that rotate faster than any blocklist can keep up. We walked through the full setup, in order, in How to Set Up Your Parent’s iPhone to Block Scam Calls and Texts.

This is the part where an app like ours does something Apple’s settings can’t. Not Today runs a community database of reported spam numbers, so a number that just hit ten other people gets blocked before it reaches her, and keyword filtering catches the “your account has been suspended” texts that come from numbers nobody has reported yet. Free, no account, nothing for her to manage.

One more thing, and it matters more than the settings

Do not make her feel stupid.

The scripts these crews run are tested on thousands of people. They use real agency names, real case numbers, spoofed caller ID showing the actual IRS switchboard, and increasingly, cloned voices of family members built from a few seconds of audio pulled off social media. The FTC’s own analysis of these cases describes the method as manufacturing a fake emergency and then keeping the person on the phone specifically so they cannot check with anyone. That is a design, not a gullibility test.

The single strongest protection an older adult has is a family member they can call mid-scam without feeling embarrassed. Every time someone gets shamed for falling for one, that channel closes a little, and the next loss gets bigger because nobody found out until it was over.

So make the calls, file the reports, fix the phone settings. And then tell her you’re glad she told you.

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Not Today is a free spam-blocking app for iPhone. We built it to catch spam before it reaches you, using keyword rules, a community database of reported numbers, and optional AI detection. No account required. Download on the App Store.