A judge ruled last week that law enforcement is allowed to seize credit cards and gift cards without a warrant in order to extract data on the magnetic stripe.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that it was reasonable for Texas police to scan gift cards found in a vehicle.
In the case United States v. Turner, defendant Courtland Turner was traveling in a car driven by Roderick Henderson. They were “pulled over for lacking a visible license plate light,” according to the court document.
After Henderson was unable to provide a driver’s license, the officer ran background checks on both of the men and, discovered that Turner had an active arrest warrant for possession of marijuana.
The law enforcement agent probed the vehicle and found “an opaque plastic bag” with roughly 100 gift cards.
The officer seized the cards and swiped them with his in-car computer, without first obtaining a warrant. The officer then handed over the goods to the Secret Service after finding nothing of value.
“A subsequent scan of the gift cards revealed that at least forty-three were altered, meaning the numbers encoded in the card did not match the numbers printed on the card,” the court file reads. The investigating officer contacted the commercial sources of the gift cards — a local grocery store and a Walmart — which provided photo evidence of Henderson and Turner present at the shops.
The court denied Turner’s motion of suppression of evidence. It declared that the inspection of the magnetic stripes is not unconstitutional because “(1) Henderson provided consent for the seizure of the gift cards and (2) the later examination of the cards did not constitute a search.”
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