The only reason you should buy a gift card is to give it as a gift. If someone asks you to buy a gift card as a form of a payment, it’s a scam.

More and more often, con artists are demanding payments by gift cards. Just remember, legitimate companies are not going to accept gift cards as a form of payment. Our national Call for Action team has been tracking this pattern.

“No company, no utility company, no sheriff’s department, the marshal’s service, none of these people are accepting gift card payments,” said Eduard Bartholme, executive director of Call for Action.

If you get a call, don’t engage with the scammer.

“If they claim to be the power company, hang up the phone, find your power bill and call the company directly and ask them if there’s a problem with your payment,” Bartholme said. “There are no companies that have struck a deal with your power company to start allowing for payments via gift card.”

A new report by the Federal Trade Commission says consumers lost more than $40 million to scams using gift cards or reloadable cards in 2017. That’s double the losses from 2015. This year, consumers have lost more than $53 million in gift cards to scams.

“The trend is that scammers have moved away from asking victims to wire money in favor of instructing victims to go out and buy gift cards and then reading them the numbers off the back,” Bartholme said. “You can liquidate the funds right away once you’ve done that.”

The FTC said consumers are often being asked to go to specific stores, like Walmart or Walgreens, and buy a specific brand of card. This year, the FTC said more than 40 percent of consumers paid scammers using an iTunes gift card or Google Play card.

If you’ve made a payment to a fraudster, you should report it to the gift card company. The FTC said crooks prefer gift cards because they can get money quickly, the transaction is very hard to reverse, and they can remain anonymous.

“What we’re finding is that once that money is gone, it’s gone. Liquidation happens almost immediately,” Bartholme said.

Please share this column with your friends and family to warn them about this scheme. If you are the victim of a scam, you can report it to the FTC at www.FTC.gov.