A cashier's warning did not prevent an Iserlohn woman from giving gift-card codes to a caller promising a lottery prize, according to a September 17 report by Kreispolizeibehörde Märkischer Kreis. Police did not disclose the value of the cards. [S01]

The 76-year-old was told she had won EUR38,000 but needed to pay processing fees. She bought gift cards at a petrol station the following day and read the codes over the phone despite the seller's warning. About an hour later, she became suspicious and reported the fraud.

Prize promise and card expenditure are different figures

The EUR38,000 figure was the caller's claimed prize, not a police estimate of the woman's loss. The report names neither the gift-card brand nor the retailer, and provides no recovery result.

The incident distinguishes a retail purchase from the subsequent handover of redeemable information. A warning occurred at the point of sale, but the purchaser later disclosed the codes through a separate channel.

That sequence is relevant to gift-card distribution because completing a sale does not end the opportunity for intervention. This single reported case, however, provides no measure of how often cashier warnings succeed or fail.