Protecting your online purchases during the holidays

During this holiday season, while you are searching for the perfect gifts for your loved ones, online scammers are searching for new ways to steal your money and personal information.

Online shopping has become popular for the ease of purchase and product availability.

“I love being able to see the product in person and feel it. But online is a lot easier, especially when you’ve got kids, shopping from home is wonderful,” said Megan Della Rossa, owner of Any Earrings.

But with that convenience comes an increase in opportunities to fall victim to a scam.

“Scammers utilize these types of events, whether it’s a big sporting event or whether it’s a holiday event, to push a lot of scams on their victims. And we’re going to see that again this year. So, holiday shopping, shoppers who are out there going online to try to find the best deals they can possibly get are going to be fed up a lot of scams, whether through text messages, email messages on their website as they’re browsing places around the web,” said Jon Clay, Vice President of Threat Intelligence at Trend Micro.

With such a wide variety of ways to buy items online, knowing what to look for in a scam can help you navigate the online space.

“I always do a double-check online. I look, I google the business, and I make sure that they have good reviews and that there aren’t other customers out there saying that it’s a scam,” said Della Rossa.

“It’s always going to be kind of similar in nature in terms of they’re going to try and entice you with great deals, great opportunities, you name it. And they’ll utilize that to try to get you to click on a link or open an attachment. And then what that does is usually sends you to a fraudulent website that looks extremely professional,” said Clay. “You may actually get the option to buy the goods, but you tend to not get the goods. They just steal your credit card information. They steal your personal information and then they use that to scam you in the future,”

Scammers have also learned to utilize artificial intelligence to enhance their scams, but Artificial Intelligence can also be detected – if you know what to look for.

“If you’re in a phone call, for example, and you suspect that that person might not be real, ask them to do some things like turn your head back and forth or do something, you know, up and down or say something like that, because a lot of cases you can’t do real time deep fake today. So, doing that kind of thing can help you identify if it’s if they are real or not. Look for blurry images, look for weird things like we’ve heard, you know, photos of people with six fingers, for example, things like that are definitely suspect,” said Clay.

Even during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, staying alert to the dangers of the internet can keep you and your wallet out of the wrong hands.