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Senate advances bill targeting organized theft of gift cards
Summary
Senate Bill 84 would create a statutory offense and penalties for acquiring or retaining gift cards or gift-card information with criminal intent; sponsor described an organized-crime pattern targeting gift cards and proposed a penalty and an aggregate-loss metric for enforcement.
Senate Bill 84, a measure aimed at criminalizing the acquisition or retention of gift cards or gift-card information with intent to steal or fraudulently use the value, was advanced by the Kansas Senate on Feb. 12.
Senator Warren (Johnson) explained the bill as a response to an organized criminal trend the sponsor said was originating from abroad and targeting the U.S. gift-card industry. Warren described a pattern in which bad actors remove or tamper with gift cards in stores, extract or test activation information at off-site facilities, then return the cards to retail shelves and later use or resell the fraudulently accessed balances.
Warren said large retailers are frequent targets and that the U.S. gift-card market is large and concentrated in specific geographies. The bill, he said, would define and penalize the crime of acquiring or retaining a gift card or gift-card information and would permit aggregation of theft amounts over a seven-day period to establish the scale of organized activity.
Warren stood for questions; no opponents or amendments were recorded on the floor. The committee reported the bill favorably and it was included on the consent calendar for final action; the roll call on final action listed 39 senators voting in favor and none opposed among the listed bills.
The floor explanation focused on defining the criminal conduct and the investigation tool of aggregating losses over a defined time window; the sponsor did not provide draft penalty amounts during the floor description.
