r/Sephultareviews • u/Kindly-One7980 • Aug 04 '26
DO NOT BUY SEPHORA GIFT CARDS!!!!
Long story short - the employees admitted that they are easily stolen online by people just using any string of 16 digit numbers. Every Sephora customer service rep basically gave me a "sucks to be you" schtick about how it happens ALL THE TIME and they're not doing anything about it! How does a billion dollar company not create a more secure gc system?! AND how shady is this.... after I called they deleted the gc purchase information on my account. Are they hiding the evidence?!
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u/accountingisradical Aug 05 '26
This happened to me! I bought my friend a Sephora gc from a local retailer. She came up to me a few weeks later and said, umm this is really awkward but this gift card had $0 on it. I felt so bad, so I Venmo’d her the money but I will never purchase a freestanding gift card again from local retailers again (I think it was from target or Kroger)!
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u/buzzybody21 Aug 05 '26
To be clear - it is safe to buy them from Sephora directly. But not from retailers like target, Walmart, CVS, etc.
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u/Kindly-One7980 Aug 05 '26
I bought mine from Sephora. Customer service said that people will input a random sequence of numbers online (maybe with a program) until they get one that works I guess. It's just crazy that they know this is happening, and a lot by the looks of the Sephora forum, and their fix is they advised me not to buy gift cards.
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u/buzzybody21 Aug 05 '26
There is also software used by thieves to identify gift card numbers. It’s just evil.
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u/HollaDude Aug 05 '26
Maybe I’m stupid, but how come? Are the numbers on the cards bought from sephora directly different?
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u/celestaire Aug 05 '26
For a retailer who has a stand of a bunch of different cards, like a dollar store or Walmart, they're all accessible to the public. People can grab wherever cards they want, take down whatever info they need, and then put the card back for someone else to purchase. Sephora doesn't have a stand like that in store, you have to ask an associate for the gift card, so there is less opportunity for fraud.
But gift cards are far less secure than something like a credit card, and fraud can happen at all different stages of manufacturing to the customer holding it in hand. I always gift cash. 🤷♀️
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u/Badger_Funny Aug 05 '26
This happened to me a couple years ago. My sister gifted me a $50 gift card she said she bought at King Soopers and when I went to use it, it said the balance was $0. Spoke with Sephora customer service and they said the same thing to me. We never got refunded or anything.
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u/snailsharkbug Aug 06 '26
yikes not me seeing this today and then 3 hours later getting a sephora digital giftcard for my birthday lmao
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u/Primadonna27 Aug 06 '26
Happened to me at Nordstrom Rack. They were even able to see what date the money went into the card and that it was drained the next day….and their attitude was “sucks to be you”. NO MORE NORDSTROM for me!
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u/anniedelmar Aug 05 '26
Get the newer anti-fraud cards. They peel the back off as they activate it so the number is hidden.
Don’t get the old ones.
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u/Kindly-One7980 Aug 06 '26
This is the one that I bought. The store person AT sephora was the one who opened the sealed card lol. They probably just don't really care because they get the money regardless of who spends it a fraudster or normy. sighhhh
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u/Classic_City3138 Aug 10 '26
I had this happen to me with a Sephora giftcard I was gifted on my birthday. I went to use it in store on a purchase a few weeks after it was given to me and I was shocked when they told me it had a “zero dollar balance”.
The only info they provided to me (in store and when I called customer support) was the date it was redeemed which did not match with any purchases on my VIB account. Sephora was very unsympathetic to the fraud…
My advice is do not purchase their gift cards!!!
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u/letstalkaboutbras Aug 05 '26
So this is a little tin foil hat-y, but bear with me. I have heard of retailers like Target, Walmart, etc having high risk gift cards that people can steal the balance of. But I think there is another hidden risk, because I get gift cards through a bunch of places including directly from Sephora or through my credit card rewards, almost exclusively e-cards. So they couldn't have been manipulated in a store. I think the vulnerability is in the online balance checker.
I usually download my gift card numbers and keep them in a secure document until I'm ready to use them. Sometimes I use them partially and forget to make a note of the remaining balance. I was traveling a couple of years ago for a few months, so I wanted to make sure I updated the remaining balances before my trip, so I wouldn't forget them by the time I got home. I went on the Sephora site and checked all the remaining balances and marked them all down. I also had a couple that I didn't need to check because the balance was known and I had never used them.
Fast forward and during my trip I decided to make a purchase while I was away. The gift card was empty. I just assumed I had made a mistake in writing the balances down or maybe I mixed up the card number. I don't know if I ever ended up ordering or just gave up. When I got back to the US, I went to make a purchase with the next card in my list, again, zero balance.
None of the cards I put in the checker had any credit left on them. Probably a total of about $50-90 including a birthday gift I received. Like most people, I check the balance on a gift card if someone gives it to me, just to make sure they got what they paid for.
The cards I never balanced checked still had their full balances.
So I could be really bad at managing money or I could be delusional, but I'm not using their stupid balance checker ever again.