Holidays Are For Giving… And For Some, Taking.

Posted by on December 6th, 2021 in Uncategorized

The holidays are a time for togetherness, celebration, and giving. Unfortunately, scammers take advantage of the season to give gifts to themselves, using your money to pay for it. In fact, a new AARP study shows that the entire gift-giving process offers a number of opportunities for scammers to get in on the act for their own benefit.

AARP’s new survey on holiday scams found that 35% of US adults have experienced fraud when buying a product through an online ad.

Here are a few tips to consider when online shopping:

• Scammers will offer incredible deals for all the items on your holiday shopping list. But clicking the link provided may take you to a fake retail website that may be a convincing copy of a legitimate site, or to an entirely made-up site

You may end up buying something that never arrives (or what arrives is a low-cost version of what you were expecting).

Or, worse, your visit to the fake site could enable the crooks to download malicious software to your device, allowing them to steal logins and passwords, even to financial accounts.

If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

If you’ve never heard of a company before, check it out. 1- Type the company name into a web browser with the words “complaint, scam, fraud” and see if anything negative comes up. And 2- Look for spelling errors, unprofessional website design, limited contact options, or unusual web addresses.

• Avoid clicking on links even if you think the message or the ad is from a familiar retailer — instead, go to your web browser and type the web address you know to be the right one to avoid getting sent to a cloned site.

Source: (AARP- Watchdog Alerts)

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