Woman loses $160 loaded onto Walmart Green Dot prepaid debit card

OGDEN — If you load money onto a prepaid debit card, you expect the money to be there when you need it.

But an Ogden woman says within minutes of loading $160 onto her Walmart prepaid debit card, poof, the money was gone.

Now she's questioning how someone accessed her account and why Green Dot, the company that issued the card, won't give her money back.

Woman's prepaid debit card drained after loading cash at Walmart

"Here's a receipt from Walmart," said Jessica Burton, showing the KSL Investigators proof of the $160 she loaded onto a prepaid debit card.

Burton had a plan for that money.

"I was saving up some money so I could get me a scooter, so I could get to and from work," she said.

Burton doesn't have a bank account or a credit card, and the scooter she wanted was on Walmart's website.

She needed the money digitally, so she drove to Walmart and loaded the cash onto the prepaid card.

But when she got home and tried to use it?

"It wasn't working," she said.

She called Green Dot, the company that issued the card, and was told the card was registered to someone else.

"If it was registered to another name, then where is my money?" she asked.

Gone, she was told.

Only 26 cents remained in the account. And she says Green Dot told her there was nothing it could do for her.

"I just, like I thought, 'No, there's no way they will have to refund this money. They're going to see clearly that the card was just barely registered. And, we're going to get to the bottom of this.'"

Hoping the KSL Investigators could help get to the bottom of it, Burton asked Get Gephardt to investigate.

Green Dot responds to prepaid debit card fraud complaint

Get Gephardt reached out to Green Dot on Burton's behalf.

In a statement, a spokesperson wrote that "account protection and fraud prevention are top priorities," and that the company works "around the clock and invest(s) heavily to identify, block and address fraudulent activity."

But for "privacy and security reasons," the company would not discuss Burton's case.

Burton told us Green Dot followed up with her, but the answer hadn't changed. She would not be getting her money back.

Does FDIC insurance protect prepaid debit cards from fraud?

There is something else about Burton's prepaid card that caught our attention.

The package in which the card came, and the card itself, has the logo for the FDIC.

It's the same logo you see on banks, and it means your money is protected. Right?

Yes and no.

FDIC insurance protects eligible deposits if an insured bank fails. It does not mean your money is insured against theft or fraud.

In other words, seeing the FDIC logo on a prepaid debit card doesn't guarantee you'll get your money back if someone steals it.

Could a fake QR code have led to the missing money?

As for how someone was able to access Burton's account and drain her funds, Burton has her suspicions.

She says there was a QR code on the card's packaging that she scanned to register the card. But when she did, something strange happened.

"It was weird because something popped up that said, '$1.99.' Protection for like antivirus and things like that."

Had the QR code actually taken her to a crook's website?

She doesn't know for sure.

But just last month, the Federal Trade Commission warned consumers that scammers can replace legitimate QR codes with fakes that lead to websites designed to steal money or personal information.

The FTC warned that fake QR codes can direct people to websites that look legitimate, where scammers try to trick consumers into entering personal or financial information.

The agency recommends checking a website's address before entering information and avoiding QR codes that appear to have been tampered with.

Whether a QR code scam is what happened to Burton remains unclear.

What to know before loading money onto a prepaid debit card

Burton knows one thing for sure. Nearly all the money she had been saving for a way to get to work is gone.

"I feel very frustrated. Very, very frustrated," she said.

And while Green Dot emphasized its commitment to security and fraud prevention, the company also downplayed its responsibility for fraud, telling KSL that anytime someone loads money onto one of its prepaid cards, the money should be treated like cash.

Prepaid debit cards have surged in popularity as we have become more and more of a cashless society, especially for folks who don't have a traditional credit card or bank account. But as Burton learned the hard way, the protections can be different from those offered by more traditional cards.

Related topics