Holly Kay bought eight $1,000 Macy’s gift cards at a California mall because a scammer told her to on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Forty minutes later, she bought $13,000 more in gift cards at that store.

The ease with which Ms. Kay was able to complete those purchases underscores the growing popularity of gift cards among scammers seeking quick, hard-to-trace ways to take money from their victims.

Buying multiple gift cards is often easier than initiating a wire transfer, because the cards are easily purchased and the numbers can be sent instantly by phone or text message to a fraudster who might otherwise have to wait for a large bank transaction to clear, law-enforcement officials say.

The gift cards Ms. Kay, 68 years old, purchased at Macy's Inc. were among nearly 120 that she bought from several retailers in one week, as part of a scam in which a fraudster told her she was helping catch a hacker who had compromised her home computer.

At the fraudster’s direction, she also spent $19,000 in one hour on gift cards at a Nordstrom store. The scammer remained on the phone with her for most of the transactions and at times had remote control of her computer, coaching her on how to answer cashier questions about why she was buying the gift cards.

Gift cards sold by large retailers are increasingly used by scammers in all flavors of fraud, including robocallers impersonating government officials or online criminals pretending to be a person’s employer, law-enforcement officials say. How companies respond to scammers’ embrace of their gift cards varies widely.

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The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, part of the Treasury Department, has rules aimed at limiting sales of more than $10,000 in gift cards to any one person on the same day unless a retailer has systems in place to flag suspect transactions.

Still, as in Ms. Kay’s case, purchases at times bypass that threshold.

A Macy’s spokeswoman said it allows sales of more than $10,000 in gift cards to a customer in a single day, but has “a robust anti-money laundering program in place.” The company is working to enhance awareness for customers about scam attempts and has bolstered scam-awareness training for managers, she added.

A Nordstrom Inc. spokeswoman said the retailer has controls and policies in place to limit gift-card sales to $2,000 per card and $10,000 per customer each day and that taking care of customers is its priority. “We’re sorry to hear this happened to this customer. We take these situations seriously and are working with our teams to look into it,” she said.

In all, Ms. Kay purchased $119,000 in gift cards at the direction of scammers around Thanksgiving, she said.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., which issued the debit and credit cards Ms. Kay used to pay for most of the gift cards, sent her three separate emails about suspect transactions on Nov. 23, and all were verified, a bank spokesman said. Ms. Kay says she has no record of the emails. Chase reimbursed Ms. Kay for $115,000, the amount she lost using her debit and credit cards from the bank.

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Each retailer determines the maximum denomination of its gift cards and sets its own limits on the value of cards sold per transaction or day. Companies aren’t always required to collect information such as the name or driver’s license number of the buyer.

Apple Inc. added a warning in May to its in-store checkout system telling consumers that scammers sometimes ask victims to buy gift cards and warning them not to provide gift-card information to someone they don’t know.

After that action, the number of reported scams by victims that purchased Apple gift cards declined in New York City, said New York Police Department Deputy Inspector Jessica E. Corey, commanding officer of the crime-prevention division.

At times, the technology company freezes the Apple IDs of users who redeem gift cards the company suspects were obtained through scams, a spokeswoman said.

Nationally, the volume of gift cards purchased in scams is difficult to quantify, because they are used in disparate scams that typically also include bank transfers, mailing cash or transmitting bitcoin.

Click here to read the rest of this story in The Wall Street Journal, where it was first published.