An apparent oversight from Google is made worse by the fact that many people check our gift card balances online. It appears that Google has inadvertently approved a prominent ad for a fake Target gift card balance checker designed to steal your funds.
A Reddit user at r/assh OLED design spotted the question while searching Google for Target gift card balance on his phone, and also found that the first result was an ad titled “Check Gift Card Balance – Target.” In fact, this website is not Target, it is a website called bristolhirevan. The ad’s description says it will let users check their gift card balance right away, and it also offers all van sizes to meet demand.
While the site’s name doesn’t sound at all convincing, its interface does look real, even though the real Target site requires people to log in to check their gift card balances, which the fake site doesn’t. Other than that, the only thing wrong with the page is the URL, it still has the domain name bristolhirevan and every link on the page leads to the real Target homepage.
If the person visiting is really in a hurry and somehow distracted enough to ignore the mention of the van, they may accidentally enter their gift card number and security code here and get stolen. Gift card scams appear to be on the rise. Last year, the FTC reported that victims of gift card scams lost a total of $148 million in the first nine months of 2021 — more than in all of 2020.
Among them, Target gift cards are clearly the first choice for scammers, as FTC data shows that people were defrauded of $35 million worth of Target gift cards last year, which is more than double that of other gift cards brands. As the FTC points out, gift card scams are often carried out over the phone, where the scammer pretends to be an employee of a company like Google or Amazon (or even someone at a federal agency) and then asks the victim to pay in the form of a gift card. Yet fake balance-checking sites like these tend to hide in plain sight — even as Google ads.
A 2020 report by Bleeping Computer drew attention to sites posing as Target gift card balance inquiry pages, noting that Target is actually one of the most commonly copied sites by scammers. The Verge reached out to Google for comment on how the scam slipped through its ad review process and whether it would be removed, but received no immediate response.