Doing Better Business: How to avoid scams during holiday shopping

MISSOULA, Mont. — This month we all spend a good amount of money on holiday shopping, buying for friends and loved ones, but not everyone has good intentions this time of year. The Better Business Bureau helps us identity scams.

One of the most prevalent scam types that gets reported to Better Business is online shopping scams. There are a lot of great cyber deals available during the holiday season, but you need to be on the lookout for the bad guys.

“It’s easy to forget to dot our I’s cross our T’s when we’re doing some of this online shopping,” said Cameron Nakashima of the BBB. “But it’s really important because with an increase predicted to be a record-breaking year for online purchases.”

If you are going to do some holiday shopping online, how can you identify a deal that maybe too good to be true?

“What people should be aware of is that those online shopping scams that are really common, those are going to be the shop the fake shopping websites or the fake deals,” Nakashima said. “And it’s going to look like perhaps a brand or a product that you’re familiar with, but it’s on a website that doesn’t actually belong to that brand … They’re not trying to pretend that they’re that brand, but they’re trying to say that they’re selling that product, and it can be a counterfeit product or might not exist at all.”

A second scam that is common and comes directly to your inbox is the phising or text emails.

“What they’re trying to do is get you to click on a link so that you’ll download some malicious malware or give them some personal information,” Nakashima said.

When I have to go shopping for someone for the holiday and don’t know what to get them, it’s easy to purchase them a gift card.

But be careful. I’ve heard scam artists will go into stores, take the code from the card and then when you purchase the card, it turns out that there’s nothing left on the card.

Is that a myth, or is that actually a common thing?

“Not a myth, that is actually something that we’ve seen reports about,” Nakashima said. “Criminals are going in, they’re taking the cards off the shelf. Sometimes they’ll take a whole stack of them off the shelf at a time, and really, since they’re not preloaded, there’s not a loss to the company when somebody just walks out the front door with those. So they’re walking out the front door, they’re carefully repackaging, they’re taking the codes, repackaging these to make it look like they haven’t been tampered with and putting them back on the store shelves, so that when somebody does activate the card, they’ve immediately got access.”

So how do you avouid this type of scam?

“One of the best pieces of advice that we have is if you want to buy a gift card, shop online with a trusted retail seller and make sure you’re not purchasing that gift card through a third party,” Nakashima said.

Scams also look different when shopping with a smaller store operation compared to a large corporation.

“An employee will actually compromise the security of the store, and so they might actually fall for a phishing email and give away some information from the store, and that allows the bad guys to get into the systems,” Nakashima said.

For more information, visit bbb.org.