How to protect yourself from online shopping scams
As the holiday season approaches, more and more people are taking to their screens for the best deals, but those deals could be more costly than you anticipate.
“We see a tremendous uptick in bad actors attempting to defraud and confuse consumers with email, texting, phone calls,” Carl Kriebel, head of Schneider Downs' Cybersecurity Program, said.
Kriebel says there are some ways to avoid a scam during Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, starting with staying vigilant.
He says one way to verify if the promotion or deal is legitimate is by calling the actual company or looking up their website to see if you can find the promotion yourself. And Googling the actual promotion to see if others reported it as a scam.
"We want people to think of themselves as a filtering process. Number one, does this message, does this note to me, have context. Is it something that makes sense to me, do I recognize it? Was it related to a transaction perhaps that I made at home depot or Amazon.com," Kriebel said. "That will be the first thing, if it doesn't have context then it probably isn't relevant to you and it's probably someone attempting to obtain your information for their own fraudulent use."
Kriebel added that if there is context in the message, you should double-check the URL address.
“Check Point research follows the attackers, the hackers and the scammers. Just in this month alone, there's been a 17% uptick in impersonated brands,” Check Point Security’s Pete Nicoletti said.
Nicoletti says hackers even impersonate shipping brands like UPS or FedEx, claiming they need more money to deliver your item.
"Your inbox is a way for hackers to get malicious files directly to your PC and that's what they want," Nicoletti said.
Both experts say the biggest key is verifying with the actual company in order to avoid a potentially bigger, and unwanted, price tag in the end.
“With the uptick in inflation, potential for a living recession, I think it's fair to say people are going to be looking for those deals, and many of these attempts to obtain your data are going to be clocked in a deal, so be wary of that, be vigilant,” Kriebel said.
Experts say it's hard to track down hackers but if you do fall victim to a scam, change your passwords immediately. They recommend using different passwords for different platforms or changing them once every few weeks.
