The holiday season is always a happy time when families, friends, colleagues, and communities get the time to come together and share beautiful memories. But as other members of the greater society go about their affairs during the holiday season, it is always good to be aware that this is also a time when scammers take advantage and use every opportunity to scam people of their money, especially online shoppers.
Across many countries, the holiday season is marked by a spike in online shopping holiday scams which consistently seem to make almost 50% of all scams reported during the holiday season.
Why Scams Increase During Holidays
The holidays are normally marked by logistical nightmares around the world. It gets worse when there are logistical challenges especially in times of pandemics such as the COVID 19 pandemic whose effects can be as far-reaching as to disrupt supply chains. When supply chains are affected, it complicates the process of finding gifts and other items due to shortages. This is the kind of challenge that scammers love to turn into massive scamming opportunities.
According to the Better Business Bureau, online shoppers need to be very careful when buying stuff online for the holiday season. The secret weapon against scammers is to ensure that you are doing your purchases from a trustworthy platform. Of course, this can be easier said than done because of the tricks scammers use including cloning the websites of major shopping platforms.
Avoiding holiday scams
As much as scammers are crafty criminals who are not ashamed to go to any extent to swindle money from unsuspecting citizens, there are a couple of things you can do to protect your hard-earned money;
- Research the company behind the website where you want to make a purchase from.
- Check reviews online on credible review platforms. Reviews are indeed one of the best ways to tell if a business is legit or not. Be careful though not to be misled by fake reviews. You can identify dishonest reviews by paying attention to how they are framed. Reviews that seem to be trying too hard to heap praise on a certain business are most likely influenced and not necessarily coming from a genuine shopper out to share their experience.
- Scrutinize the URL to ensure the website is secure. An unsecured URL will always have the sign of an open padlock while a secure one will have the sign of a closed padlock. Also, the end of HTTP should have an ‘S’ i.e HTTPS
- If you are buying from a popular website for example Amazon or Walmart, look through the letters one by one to ensure it’s not scammers who have put up a clone. For example, scammers can have something like Amazzon.com instead of Amazon.com. It is such small tweaks that have cost many shoppers millions of funds.
Funds Recovery
If you are a victim of such scams, then you will be confident to learn that all might not yet be lost after all thanks to the helpful services we offer here at Scam Help. Take advantage of this FREE CONSULTATION and find out your chances of recovering any lost funds.
