DALLAS, TX -- Giving the gift of plastic soared this holiday season, and now retailers are stepping up efforts to thwart the latest scams and cons regarding gift card fraud.

With an estimated $18.5 billion-worth of gift cards sold this holiday season, The Dallas Morning News reports that gift card fraud is on the rise. Subsequently, retailers and restaurateurs are teaming with trade groups, card processors and law enforcement to combat the latest scams without burdening the process for law-abiding consumers to redeem their gift cards.

"Gift card fraud is a growing concern among retailers nationwide," Joseph LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention for the National Retail Federation (NRF), told the newspaper, adding, “Gift cards are being used as mainstream currency among retailers, from fast-food restaurants to major department stores.”

Because most gift cards are sold during the holidays, January and February are considered the prime months for gift card redemption by both consumers and thieves, writes the newspaper, adding that industry experts describe gift card fraud as “a small part of the overall $31 billion in retail ‘shrink.’”

Unfortunately, data is hard to come by to quantify how much of a problem gift card fraud actually is. “There isn't a lot of good data,” Richard Hollinger, a criminology professor at the University of Florida, told the newspaper. He notes that companies have their own private data that is withheld from the public for security reasons, as well as for fear of tipping off thieves and “scaring off customers.”

According to experts, gift card fraud is a significantly growing problem as thieves become more sophisticated with their methods. The easiest method, notes the newspaper, is a simple slight of hand where a store clerk of restaurant employee will hand a card back to the patron that should have a value attached to it, when in fact it doesn’t. The employee then pockets the real gift card.

One way to combat fraud is to look for patterns or make note of unusual transactions involving the same person or group, notes the newspaper.

Andrew Robbins, president of Paytronix Systems Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., comments that his company looks for strange activities, such as the frequency of money being added and taken off of a single gift card.

Meanwhile, as concerns grow, they may not be enough to deter the growing amount of restaurateurs and retailers who implement gift card programs.

"Most often, they have a big concern up front about fraud, then when they start looking at the upside, it more than outweighs any issue about fraud," Adam de Malignon, sales director for Gift Card Solutions, told the newspaper, adding that they eventually realize “there’s too much money to be made.”