> The American Association of Retired People (AARP, an advocacy non-profit for older adults) has paid for ads on podcasts I listen to. The ad made a claim which felt raspberry-worthy (in service of an important public service announcement), which they repeat in writing: Asking to be paid by gift card is always a scam.

>Of course it isn’t. Gift cards are a payments rail, and an enormous business independently of being a payments rail. Hundreds of firms will indeed ask you to pay them on gift cards!

That’s where I stopped reading. The author seems more interested in being contrarian for clicks than in giving practical advice. AARP is right here: being asked to pay by gift card is a major red flag, and unless you know the company personally, it’s time to walk away.

Patrick very carefully declined to give examples of such legitimate yet debanked businesses. Presumably because they're all grey market stuff that sets off a whole other "wait, is that legal?" conversation.

I have never seen a legitimate business asking for payment in gift cards. I've encountered the traditional tradesmen offering discounts for cash, though.

Edit: I think he may actually be talking about businesses accepting payments in their own gift cards, which is so obvious that it's easy to forget. It's not a scam when Apple ask you to pay in Apple gift cards. It's just the only non scam such case.

I’m the kind of nerd who enjoys the surprising nitty gritty details, so I enjoyed the rest of the article and I’d recommend people read it.

But I agree with you: the AARP is 100% right to be running PSAs like this. I’d be curious to hear more about how a shadow economy like this would/would not help unbanked people, which he implies but did not describe at all. But it certainly doesn’t change the point that gift cards are an effective vehicle for fraud, and anytime someone asks to pay you (or especially you to pay them) in gift cards… your scam senses should tingle.

Agreed. It's more practical to tell seniors that all gift card requests are scams rather than teaching them to identify warning signs, since legitimate gift card payments are so rare.

The author is an expert in the field of payments. What you call "being contrarian" is better called "speaking the truth".

The world is full of people who, like you, seek any reason to not listen or read interesting things in favour of doing just about anything else. You don’t win a prize for being part of that group — at best, you saved as much time as it took you to write that comment. In exchange you are likely poorer for it intellectually because Patrick’s writing has an exceptionally high signal to noise ratio, and that signal is one most are not privy to.

At no point did the article claim AARP was in the wrong for running those ads. But had you kept reading you’d maybe have understood that wasn’t the point nor the premise in the first place.

Yes the whole essay was premised on this dumb little sleight of hand. It’s disingenuous.

AARP isn’t telling fibs. It’s giving sound advice.

The only legit use of a gift card is when you’re redeeming that gift card directly with the issuer. No business is going to request or require that you do that.