OHIO — Each holiday season people fall victim to scams, including “gift card draining."

Lee Anne Lanigan with the Better Business Bureau said it’s something she sees often and that Ohioans should take the extra steps to make sure they are not scammed.

“When the cashier loads your cash onto that card, it’s going directly into the scammers pocket because they put their sticker on top of your gift card,” she said.

She reminded people that gift cards are just like cash and that you’re likely not going to get your money back if you get gift card scammed.

“Your credit card has protections put in place for you as a consumer that a gift card just doesn’t have because, like there is no protection for cash, there are no protections for gift cards,” she said.

Lanigan explained what scammers usually do to get money.

“Typically the scammer will direct them to scratch the security number on the back, take a picture of it with their phone and then send that picture to them," she said. "Once they have that security number, they can instantly pull all of the dollars off that card and put them right in their pocket."

She made sure to mention that you shouldn’t give out a gift card code online or over the phone because scammers can be convincing and pretend to be someone they aren’t.

“These phone calls or emails or text messages instructing them to go buy a gift card for a myriad of reasons," she said. "It could be to pay an unpaid debt. It could be because they’re pretending to be your bank, pretending to be a government agency."

You can report a scam to the Better Business Bureau, and the Federal Trade Commission advised that no real business or government agency would ever tell you to buy a gift card to pay them.