A purported request for investor gifts led a Holzgerlingen employee to buy EUR1,800 in gift cards and email their codes to unknown fraudsters, Polizeipräsidium Ludwigsburg reported on September 11. The incident occurred on September 9. [S01]

The 25-year-old received an email from someone posing as her boss. Believing the instruction was genuine, she purchased the requested cards and transmitted the codes.

Corporate gifting supplied the pretext

The account describes two steps: a seemingly legitimate business purchase, followed by disclosure of the information attached to the prepaid value. The claimed recipients were investors, giving the instruction a workplace purpose.

Police did not identify the employer, card brands or selling retailers. Their statement also did not establish how the sender impersonated the boss, whether a company mailbox was compromised, or what happened to the codes after transmission. No arrest or recovery was announced. [S01]

For employers buying gifts, the case puts the authorization of the purchase and the destination of its codes in the same control process. The reported loss arose from a false instruction presented as corporate gifting; the police account does not identify a fault in the gift-card product itself.