When Luke Charters and his wife, Beth, were given a Marks & Spencer gift card after the birth of their second son, they were planning to stock the fridge to make the first weeks with a newborn easier.
But when Charters went to use the £75 card in a store in York, he found that the balance was zero.
The Labour MP for York Outer had been a victim of a gift card theft — a growing type fraud that has taken £400,000 from Santander customers alone this year. The bank said the number of cases reported in the first half of the year was up 115 per cent compared to the six months before.
The card had been bought at a Marks & Spencer in Leeds and its balance spent in Manchester within half an hour of it being activated. Cards are usually automatically activated at the point of sale, although in some cases the beneficiary of the gift has to call up to activate them.
Charters said: “What troubles me most is how simple the fraud was to execute and how ill-prepared the initial response by staff seemed to be.”
