I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it’s true: I fell for a costly gift card scam. Here’s how.

Well, it finally happened: I fell for a scam. Fell for it hard. So hard, so swiftly and so easily that I’m actually ashamed of myself.

It’s all especially humiliating because I’ve done a bunch of Googling and reading about this type of scheme since falling for it, and apparently, fraudsters have been using some variation of it to dupe people for years. In other words, not only should I have known better just in general, I should have known better specifically because the warning signs about this have been “out there” for some time.

Alas, I’m sharing my story — and it’s a family story, really — in the hopes that you can learn something from our mistakes.

It starts with our daughter. She graduated from college in May. A good college. Made good grades. Earned a degree in criminology, of all things. And toward the end of the summer, she landed a job at a law firm run by powerful people who themselves often work at the pleasure of other powerful people.

The position is entry-level by any definition, and in her capacity it’s not terribly unusual for her to be instructed by those in charge to perform tasks that you’d associate with gophers.

Last Monday morning, she received a text message from an unknown number that addressed our daughter by her first name and was signed by someone who identified themselves as one of the leaders of the firm, by first and last name. Then the person sending the text wrote: “I need to know if you can step out for a bit to get a task done as quickly as you can.”

Like I said, our daughter is pretty new to the job. She’s trying hard to make a good impression.

So when the person who she assumed was a company leader said there was an emergency and instructed our daughter to go buy a $500 Apple gift card “for a presentation,” she rushed to the nearest grocery store and bought one with her own personal credit card. The person continued acting as if the matter was urgent, and in short order convinced our daughter to text a photo of the code to them.

Then the person who she assumed was a company leader said they needed her to buy another one, also for $500.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s so obvious this is a scam. In hindsight, it certainly is to me. But in the moment, even though the requests felt a little strange to our daughter, they also felt just plausible enough.

And the scammer nailed the scenario, finding a mark who regarded her new job and her superiors with just the right amount of subservience; having the good luck of pushing the first text through shortly after our daughter had seen this company leader leave the building (whereas if the boss had been sitting there in the office when our daughter got the scam text, things might have gone differently); and rushing her just enough that she got flustered and let her guard down.

Here’s where I tell you that I let mine down, too.

Because she’s 22 and has a lower credit limit on her card, she was freaking out about charging another $500 to it. So she called me.

She was clearly stressed out and anxious, and like I said, I knew she did some gopher stuff. I was also engrossed in my own work, so I’m sorry to admit that I wasn’t giving her my full attention at that very moment.

Over the phone, I heard her mention being asked to peel off the label to reveal the redemption code, but I wasn’t listening.

While this was going on, her mom was actually trying to slow things down via the family group text. “Just ask if there is a company credit card you can use because you have a limited credit limit since you’re just starting out,” she had typed. But our daughter has an authorized-user card for one of my American Express cards, and I told her it was OK to just go ahead and pay for Gift Card No. 2 with that one. So she did, and when I got the fraud alert from Amex, I clicked “Y” to approve the purchase without hesitation.

That gift-card code also was texted by our daughter to the scammer. She then bought a third $500 gift card at their behest — but suddenly, finally figured out she was being duped. She did not give up that last code.

The damage, though, was done: $500 billed to her personal credit card, $1,000 billed to mine, with the only thing to show for it a $500 Apple gift card that we didn’t have any desire to possess.

Our daughter called me again, this time distraught. It immediately was sickeningly clear to both of us that we’d missed all the red flags.

Here’s where I tell you that others missed one or two red flags, though, as well.

As this was unfolding, in addition to calling me, our daughter called her roommate to explain what was going on and communicated with three other members of her team about the purchases she was being instructed to make. All four of them seemed to also interpret these as slightly odd but totally legitimate requests.

Still, yeah, I get it. Why not call just to get some sort of verbal confirmation over the phone before making that big a purchase on your own credit card? Or OK, one of the leaders of the firm asking you to buy an expensive gift card might actually have made sense, but why would you think it normal for them to ask for a photo of the redemption code?

I guess it’s like the whole boiling-frog fable.

If you walked into a grocery store to find your friend or family member jumping through these gift-card-related hoops, you’d probably go wide-eyed and ask them, “What’s wrong with you??”

But if you yourself were sitting in the water (so to speak) when it was tepid ... well, the person doing the cooking might be able to get it boiling before you figured out you’d been cooked.

And we’d definitely been cooked.

Our daughter tried to send a nasty text to the person who scammed her, but it wasn’t delivered because the number had already been ditched.

A call to Apple customer service confirmed that the two codes our daughter gave up had quickly been redeemed, and the dummy accounts set up to redeem them had already been closed. Disappointingly, Apple declined our plea for them to cancel the code for the one card we still have and issue us a refund.

I called American Express customer service and was told that it was a matter for the FTC. We filed a complaint, fully expecting to never hear back. Our daughter filed a police report and we fully expect the local authorities to also do nothing.

However, our daughter made a separate call to American Express, and the representative she spoke with did agree to open a fraud claim.

Things get a little weird here: Later in the week, fairly convinced we’d lose the case (and determined to write about it to share lessons learned), I emailed a summary of what happened to American Express’s media relations department — and long story very short, I was informed there was nothing Amex could do because I approved the charges. I argued that if I lost my card and it was found by someone who used it to make purchases before I could report it stolen, Amex would reverse those charges. So why not help us out with these? How, ultimately, is that type of victimization (being careless enough to lose your card) so different from this type of victimization (being careless enough to fall for a scam)?

But they said there was nothing they could do to help bail us out of this mess.

Yet apparently, there was. Whatever our daughter said to the representative she spoke with on that first day must have worked, because late last week both $500 charges were reversed on my American Express card. I’m certainly relieved, but to be told three very different things by three different people at Amex is a huge head-scratcher.

Citi, meanwhile, told me last Friday “the team is investigating,” but I haven’t gotten an update this week.

As for Apple — which has been the target of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of people alleging that the company benefits financially from these types of scams and willingly refuses to try to discourage them — its media relations team has ignored the multiple emails from me, meaning we’re stuck with this $500 gift card we don’t need.

(Quick side note: I’ve learned there are posted warnings about falling victim to scams almost anywhere gift cards are sold, including at the grocery store chain our daughter bought from, but these are typically in very fine print...)

Anyway, as we’ve swallowed our pride and shared our story with friends over the past week, the response has been astonishing.

No one has said to me, “Oh yeah, wow, I would have fallen for that, too.” I think people who otherwise like and respect us probably think that, in this case, we proved ourselves to be morons.

But what’s been astonishing is that several people have said something along the lines of “Oh yeah, one of my people called me the other day to ask if I’d just texted him about running out to buy me a gift card”; or “Oh yeah, my daughter’s friend was the victim of a scam just like this recently”; or “Oh yeah, they apparently use LinkedIn to find people in new jobs and then do basic research to get a name of a person who runs the company.”

That’s why I decided to write this. To keep the conversation going. To spread the word. To warn you not to be as gullible as we were. To encourage you to keep your guard up.

And, of course, to ask you this: Wanna buy a $500 Apple gift card?