I got scammed when buying Apple gift cards

My gift cards were tampered with—3 different gift cards. Someone tampered with them before the store got them, so it happened at the Apple gift card department by an employee or employees. I paid for the cards at Ralph's store; the cards were activated when I purchased them. It was about a few hundred dollars.

So I got home and opened them up, taking the card out of the sleeve, but it looked okay; it did not look to be tampered with. But when I took the card out and pulled off the gray-colored sticker so I could see the code number, three numbers in the middle of the numbers you could not read. I scratched it off in that area but still could not read the numbers, making all three cards useless.

I then called Apple Support and made a long report on the phone, sent them a picture of both sides of the card and the receipt, and also the receipt saying they were now activated. I snapped pictures of all this for all three cards, and I attached all this info and pics and sent them to the theft/fraud department.

The agent I talked to said it would be 7 to 10 days before they would get back to me, but they never did, so I then called them back on day 13 and told this woman the whole story, gave her my case number the man gave me. She then put me on hold and talked to someone, then she said they are not going to help me. Then I got pretty angry because I lost my money, and they refused to refund my losses.

Now I am out about 300 dollars or so, but they refuse to help me. In my opinion, this card tampering did not happen at the Ralph store; it happened at the Apple card center where they print the cards and put them into the sleeve. The card denominations I got were the larger ones that allow you to put 50 to 500 dollars on the card. The crooks that are doing this are targeting these larger cards, not the smaller ones for 50, 75, or 100 dollars.

I lost all my money on this, but I want to warn everyone to not purchase these larger cards from Apple. In my opinion, some employees at Apple are pulling a scam and probably sharing the money they steal from these cards with each other; even the guy that helped me make the original complaint gave me a funny feeling, too. So in my opinion, there are a few Apple employees doing this scam.