Saks Amex Offer Website Caution
One of the better deals around now is the Saks Amex Offer. A lot of people have decided to take advantage of this offer by purchasing gift cards and reselling them. That can certainly be a good way to earn points and perhaps even a small profit, but there is one very scary thing you should know about when shopping on Saks.com. It may not be secure.
I had first heard rumblings of carts getting “mixed up” back when this offer began, but it wasn’t until Miles to Memories contributor PDX Deals Guy sent me screenshots that I realized just how dangerous this was. It all started innocently with him buying gift cards to trigger the offer. After logging in and clicking to checkout, he saw the following.
I have redacted most of the letters/numbers to protect the parties involved, so let me walk you through this. PDX Deals Guy was suddenly in someone else’s account. At the top left was the other person’s full name, billing address, telephone number and email address. He also was able to see the last four digits of the payment method and all of the payment methods linked to the account. You can see below which areas he had access to.
Going back to the first screenshot, the “From”, “To” and “Recipient’s Email” were from PDX, meaning he theoretically could have used the other person’s credit card to send himself a gift card. Of course he didn’t complete the checkout, but he believes it would have gone through since no security code was required.
How to Avoid These Issues
The best way to avoid any issues is to use Guest Checkout. Saks has pretty tight fraud protection on gift card purchases so it might take a few days for your order to complete, but using guest checkout should work and more importantly it will avoid them storing your name, address or credit card information.
If you absolutely must use your online account, make sure no payment information is saved in it. Also remember that you can use this offer in-store as well.
Unauthorized Purchases
If you discover someone has made unauthorized purchases on your Saks account, contact them immediately. Hopefully Saks will make it right, but if not you should be protected by your bank.
Conclusion
This is a big problem that Saks really needs to solve. Hopefully a fix is on the way soon, because no one wants other people to have their information and/or access to their account. Have you seen similar issues when shopping on Saks? Let us know in the comments!
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Just got a chargeback from Cardpool.com. Went back and realized some orders were sent to mysterious email addresses. Saks must have been hacked. Hopefully Saks makes good on refunds.
Yikes! Hope it turns out alright.
[…] Maximizing the Saks Amex Offer? Be Careful Your Info May Be At Risk! I’ve heard about these technical issues that Saks has been having for months already. Pretty shocking that they having fixed it yet. (The Saks offer ends today, FYI.) […]
Someone placed $6k worth of orders through my saks.Com account. changed shipping addresses in my account. I got an authorization email from Amex that how i found out. called saks to cancel all the orders and change my account info.
Yikes.
Yikes, indeed. That’s what I’ve been worried about.
I just went to the store – much easier! Ebates in store cash back worked too.
Yes this is not surprising. For a high end retailer, Saks has absolutely horrendous IT and order fulfillment processes, in fact their whole supply chain is messed up. I’ve had issues with their site on many occasions and their terrible IT. And sadly their customer service is quite hit or miss and they don’t seem super knowledgeable about things. I believe they outsource their customer service to India and Alabama.
I was suddenly in someone else’s account too multiple times. I took pics of the screen where I could look at their order history, address, phone number etc. I called Saks to tell them in April and they said they would pass along a message to the supervisor. They fixed anything. It happens about half of my orders. Luckily I think I have all orders completed out of 45 and may only be missing one.
I had a different problem. For all three of my orders, if I had two gift cards of the same denomination (like $100), it would only send me one of the cards. When I called, they told me they couldn’t send me the missing cards. I had to cancel the entire orders (all three), but they failed to fully refund them like they were supposed to. I called again last Monday and they assured me it would be fixed the second time. But, 5+ days later there’s no change to my credit card activity. It’s been quite a mess.
Samething happened to me, but I just realized and reported it today through the chat (they say they will reimburse in 7 days). Did they finally reimbursed you? Did you purchase additional cards to substitute the spend for that credit? If not, did AMEX take-off the $75 credit?
PDX same thing happened to me. I added a 100 and 250, made it to checkout and very nearly sent a 50 and 300 to some person named Taylor. Haven’t had any issues today with about 12 orders but freaked me out
Glad you caught it before you purchased.
Congrats on getting 12 off today. I’ve only been able to get one to work without wrong cards and/or error messages. It’s as if they don’t want to sell gift cards … or at least not to the correct people …
Still have about 27 to get tomorrow…if I get double digit “confirmed” emails I’ll call it a good day
Now I’m even running into problems with the Guest Checkout. Sometimes I can get the correct eGC into my shopping cart and sometimes I can’t. Error messages sometimes. And I even saw a e-gift card with someone else’s email address in my shopping cart, in a different denomination that I had added. So basically their website is laughably (scarily?) screwed up.
I’d be interested in other people’s experiences, whether no problems, lots of problems, or a mixed bag.
Yikes! This is a very serious problem that Saks needs to fix. I love shopping at Saks but this can potentially lead to big problems for online shoppers. Thanks for the heads up.
Happened to me too. Except I almost bought a gift card for somebody else.