Digital Watermarking Eliminates Gift Card Fraud

Digimarc has announced the results of the first implementation of its invisible digital watermarking solution on gift cards, designed to combat persistent card fraud within the US retail sector.

The results, based on ten weeks’ data from ten Schnucks supermarkets in the St Louis area, revealed there had been no reports of fraud on Digimarc-secured cards, with 100% of cards activated successfully.

Furthermore, 87% of cashiers said the cards activated faster than traditional gift cards, resulting in a more rapid checkout, and no training was needed for customers at self-service checkouts.

Ken Sickles, Digimarc’s Chief Product Officer, explained: ‘we partnered with Schnucks, Blackhawk Network, Westrock, STL Labels, Zebra Technologies, and four major brands to implement our new gift card security solution, which involves replacing gift card activation barcodes with Digimarc’s tamper-evident solution.

‘Working with Zebra Technologies (which specialises in hardware and software for automatic identification and data capture) we configured Schnucks’ in-store scanners to automatically detect if cards showed any evidence of tampering to the Digimarc on-card watermark activation layer, eliminating the need for cashiers to open and inspect cards’.