When Mark Moore received a $50 birthday Visa gift card this year, he knew immediately how he would spend it: food and treats for his two Chihuahuas. Yet first, he wanted to verify the total.

The 49-year-old math teacher went to check its balance online. On a website for his gift card, he entered the card’s number and a three-digit security code, but got an error message. Figuring he had the numbers wrong, he entered the information again, and then a third time.

Moore fell victim to an increasingly common kind of retail fraud that is costing consumers and retailers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

He had entered his Visa card particulars into a website that scammers had made to look like the real site. Armed with the details about his card, the thieves drained all but $9 of its balance, which Moore discovered while trying to make his pet purchases.

“The card was denied,” Moore recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Well, how, because I have enough money?’”Gift cards are a longtime target for fraud. After retailers cracked down on in-store thefts, thieves moved online, according to law-enforcement and industry officials. Draining card balances using spoofed gift-card websites, in particular, is increasing.

Companies from Target, Apple and Home Depot to gaming-company Valve are working to stay ahead of the scammers, updating packaging, retraining store clerks and advising shoppers on where to check their balances.

The stakes are especially high heading into the holiday season, when gift cards rank among the most popular presents.

After his surprise at a pet store in Pearland, Texas, near his home, Moore spent two months trying to recover his stolen money, which he ultimately did get back. Now he checks balances strictly by calling a gift card’s toll-free number on the phone. Other times, he skips verification entirely and takes the card straight to the store to make purchases.

“I never thought that I would have been a person who would be scammed like this,” Moore said. “I’m normally careful.”Visa declined to comment.

Consumers and retailers lose at least $1 billion a year from gift-card fraud generally, estimates Dariush Vollenweider, a supervisory special agent at Homeland Security Investigations, an investigative arm at the Department of Homeland Security. He helps lead Project Red Hook, an agency initiative targeting organized-crime rings that exploit gift cards.

Authorities don’t know how much the losses are from spoofed websites in particular. Yet law-enforcement and industry officials say the scams using the sites are mounting as scammers try to avoid company crackdowns in stores.

The mock-website scam works like this: Fraudsters build look-alike websites that mirror those of legitimate brands. When shoppers go online to check a balance, their search takes them to a bogus page, rather than the web address provided with the plastic.

There, they log card info such as the number and PIN. Scammers use the credentials to drain the balances.

Law enforcement and companies have stepped up efforts to counter the fraud. Homeland Security Investigations is coordinating with search engines, said Vollenweider. He said his mother-in-law lost about $500 to a fake site within the past year.

Target, which redesigned its gift-card program in 2024 to prevent tampering, reminds shoppers on its security webpage to look out for gift-card packaging that looks altered and to only check balances on a specific website.

Valve is taking an even more drastic step, phasing out its physical Steam gift cards, likely by the end of this year. “As we have continued to put more and more restrictions in place, scammers have adapted,” the company said in a recent update on a support page for customers.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association Communities Foundation, which the parent organization set up to address retail crime, is working with companies, law enforcement, gift-card processors and others to stop the mock-website and other gift-card scams, said Lisa Rufolo, the foundation’s executive director.

Gift cards have been an attractive target for thieves generally in recent years because stealing them from stores doesn’t tend to trigger security alarms, unlike boosting power tools or electronics. Spoofing the balance-checking websites has become even more attractive, Rufolo said, because the fraudsters don’t even have to step inside a store.

“They can hide behind a computer,” Rufolo said. “And it becomes more difficult to identify them.”Meanwhile, customers are discovering they are victims while checking out, creating awkward and sometimes difficult situations at stores.

After looking online, Vanessa Perez figured she had a $50 balance on a Sephora gift card that she was given for a birthday before she headed to a store in Merrillville, Ind., near her home to buy makeup. When she went to pay at the, however, the clerk said around $48 had been spent. Perez said she wasn’t able to get her balance restored or money back because she didn’t have the original purchase receipt and had to pay for the items out of her own pocket.

Perez, 43, said it was unfortunate “because you don’t have any proof to say, ‘I didn’t make that purchase.’”Sephora investigates allegations of gift-card fraud reported to the company and has implemented measures including employee training, gift-card limits and guidance on checking balances in an effort to protect shoppers against gift-card fraud online and in stores, the company said.

Home Depot doesn’t guarantee a refund, though it does give some on a case-by-case basis. The company’s advice to customers is buyer beware, said Scott Glenn, the retailer’s vice president of asset protection. “We just don’t necessarily want to publicly say, ‘Hey, we’ll always fix you.’”