On Your Side helps Arizona woman recover missing money after thwarted gift card scam

SUN CITY, AZ (AZFamily) — The scammers were good. They always are. “This email came up and said, ‘Do you want to cancel your subscription to Norton Antivirus?’ I said, ‘Yes, my husband must have signed up for it again, so I started filling out the forms, and it went downhill from there,” said Kathi Diederich.

Diederich unknowingly allowed scammers into her computer. Then, someone on the phone promised he’d help protect the money in her compromised accounts. “He wanted me to go and get cash out of the bank and then I was to go to the grocery store and buy gift cards,” she told On Your Side.

The scammer requested $2,000 worth of gift cards from Nordstrom and $1,000 worth of gift cards from Sephora. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t call anybody. Don’t talk to anybody,’ Diederich recalled. “I said, ‘OK. My money is at risk, and I’ve got to do it,’ and I felt like a criminal.”

Diederich got on another phone and called one of her daughters, who immediately knew this was a scam. “I got a text from my sister, ‘Hey, mom’s being scammed right now,’” Danielle Pensa said.

Pensa helped stop everything. Her first call was to Nordstrom because her mom had already sent photos of the numbers on the cards to the scammer. “Thankfully, amazingly, somehow they only emptied one, so [Nordstrom] was able to cancel the other three,” Pensa said. She had bought four $500 gift cards. They canceled those immediately, and immediately in my email, I had a new gift card for $1,500.”

The next call was to Sephora. Those numbers hadn’t been compromised yet, but the company locked the cards, just in case. Days passed. Pensa called back. “They basically said, ‘Oh, there’s nothing we can do. That was from a third-party vendor. Those are locked. We can’t do anything about it,’ and I said, ‘Wait a second. You locked them down. I need them at least unlocked,’” Pensa said.

She also contacted the third-party vendor, Blackhawk Network. “Blackhawk says, ‘Oh no, there’s nothing we can do. We’re a business-to-business entity and you have to go back to the grocery store, at which point I lost my mind little bit,” Pensa said. “At the end of the day, my mom gives money to Fry’s. Fry’s gives money to Blackhawk. Blackhawk gives money to Sephora.”

The money had to be somewhere, but Pensa and Diederich couldn’t get it back. “You’ve basically told me that you’re keeping my mom’s money hostage and it’s not acceptable. It’s so unacceptable. It gets me viscerally angry because this shouldn’t be. This should be simple. [With] Nordstrom, I called them. They locked it down. They reissued a gift card. Simple, right?” Pensa said. “At that point is when I reached out to you guys because I didn’t know what else to do, honestly. They are just holding this money.”

Not anymore. When On Your Side got involved, the companies worked together to fix the problem, and Diederich and Pensa got a check from Kroger, a $1,000 refund for the money the scammers never got their hands on. “To my parents, $1,000 is everything. It’s a huge amount for them,” Pensa said.

A spokesperson for Blackhawk Network sent this statement to On Your Side:

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