Graph-Tech USA Open House to Showcase Secure Digital Watermarks for Gift Cards

A gift card's printed artwork may soon carry an invisible security layer that causes tampered cards to fail activation at the point of sale. Graph-Tech USA will demonstrate exactly that technology at its Fort Pierce, Florida facility on April 22 and 23, in collaboration with Digimarc Corporation.

The two-day open house runs from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. each day. The centerpiece is Digimarc's POS-readable digital watermarking, which embeds an imperceptible, data-rich mark directly into a gift card's artwork during production. Retailers' existing point-of-sale scanners can read the watermark at checkout; any card that has been physically tampered with fails that verification and cannot be activated.

William Strater, Graph-Tech's Vice President of Business Development, described the stakes plainly: "By shifting fraud prevention from detection to prevention at the point of sale, digital watermarking is redefining how the industry protects both consumers and brands." He added that the event offers "a unique opportunity to explore the future of gift card security, along with demonstrations of our latest inkjet printing solutions."

The watermark demonstrations will run alongside live showings of Graph-Tech's eZ-Inkjet® industrial inkjet printing solutions, its EMVRUNNER system, and advanced variable-data and security-printing workflows. The eZ-Inkjet® platform provides the production-grade printing capability that puts the Digimarc watermark into card artwork at scale, so attendees will see the full stack from design file to finished card, not just the security feature in isolation.

The scale of the problem makes that full-stack view relevant: Kasada identified 8.9 million stolen retail gift cards for sale on underground markets ahead of the 2025 holiday season, and gift card fraud is the most common form of fraud, with 26.6% of fraud victims reporting that money was taken using gift cards or reload cards. Physical tampering with rack-displayed cards before purchase is one of the oldest and most persistent methods. A watermarking solution that works within existing POS scanning infrastructure, rather than demanding hardware upgrades across thousands of retail locations, addresses that exposure at the moment it matters most: activation at checkout.

The open house follows directly on a session Graph-Tech will present at the ICMA Card Manufacturing & Personalization EXPO on April 21, titled "Defeating Gift Card Fraud." The company is encouraging ICMA attendees to extend their trip to the Ft. Pierce facility the following morning. One-on-one consultations with Graph-Tech's technical team will be available throughout both days of the open house.

The global gift card market was valued at $1.24 trillion in 2025 and is expected to reach $2.31 trillion by 2030, which means the stakes for getting card security right extend well beyond the holiday aisle. For personalization vendors and brands whose revenue runs through gift card channels, a prevention-first approach at POS represents a meaningful structural upgrade over the fraud-detection tools that have defined the industry's response until now.