When George Bousis founded his gift card startup Raise in 2013, the CEO didn’t anticipate that he would work with the Secret Service. “We saw the really ugly side of gift cards that not a lot of people talk about,” he told Fortune.
Chinese organized crime rings, for example, have stolen or altered gift card numbers to drain hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans, reported ProPublica in April. And Maryland recently passed a bill in June to counter fraud that mandates secure packaging for gift cards.
