Elaborate Gift Card Advertising Deception

This was drafted on February 09 2019, when we originally received this card.

Recently my wife and I received what appeared to be a personal card with several coupons and gift cards that appeared to total over $200 for baby stuff from someone named “Jen”. I noticed right away the postage stamp printed with “Presorted Standard” that made this seem a little odd. We know a few people named “Jen” (Who doesn’t?) so initially, my wife was reaching out to all her “Jen” friends to see who may have sent us a bunch of gift cards. As relatively well-informed “Millennial’s”, we are aware of many flavors of scams and deceptions running amuck both on the internet and in forms like snail mail. We’re both fairly savvy at sleuthing from the internet so we also took to Google to try to see if this is something that has happened to anyone else. Initially, we didn’t find anything related (How do you come up with a good search pattern for something like this?). We tried things like “snail mail gift card scams”, “gift card scams” “received a personal letter with coupons from Jen”, etc. Finally, we got a hit on “someone sent me thoughtful gift cards.com gift cards” a few links down linked to:

Cool… finally solved the mystery. But then I started to dig a little deeper. The following are photos of the envelope, the card, and the contents received – I have obfuscated things that could potentially be used to track these to a specific person but you will get the general picture:

The card has some smudged ink on it that makes it seem like it was hand-written, seems someone jotted a note with a sharpie and it smudged as it was drying. There are even fingerprint smudges on the the other inner half of the card. But then I used a USB microscope to take a closer look. Turns out nothing is as it seems. Take a look at the following photos. Here is the front of the card:

Here is the inside of the card:

That is not smudge at all – it is printed that way! I started to look at other details. The name on the back of the card is not “American Greetings” but it looks deceptively close. The USP code does not resolve to anything and they used a similar-looking logo to try and make the card even look legit but as you soon will see, this is all a cleverly disguised ruse.

Initially, it would appear to be sharpie ink bleeding through the cardstock, trying to convince us that this is genuinely a personal card, but as an engineer, I was a little puzzled by how even a sharpie could bleed through this thick of paper. My suspicions were correct:

This is synthetically printed to look like ink bleeding through the paper. Here is a supposed fingerprint smudge from inside the card:

Clearly printed on the card – It is hilarious to me that they would go to such extremes to try to convince people of the authenticity of this card.

On to the gift cards, they look and feel legit, they even seem to have a hand-written dollar amount scratched on them. Well, as you guessed, even that part is simulated – have a closer look at the dollar amount printed on the gift cards:

Seriously? Seriously! Here is an actual blue sharpie line I drew on the left to compare – clearly, you can see the difference between hand-drawn and printed. The little dotted colors give it away that it is printed.

Here is more of the card, the back is even printed to make it look like sharpie bled through!

Yup, even the smudge is emulated!

The cards are all printed and cut with a precision that couldn’t come from hand cutting these.

Close-up of the bleed-through on the inside of the card.

This is the heart printed on the other side of the above fake bleed-through print.

So, maybe this isn’t a scam, or maybe it is. I tend to think it is a scam because it is intended to deceive. While these places may be legit, we looked into a couple of them and the prices are so high, even with the coupons and “gift cards”, they are not very cheap. Clever advertising, or scam? You decide!