Tech Support: How to avoid holiday scams this year
Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley breaks down how consumers can avoid holiday scams this winter.
Video Transcript
ZACK GUZMAN: We are, of course, in December with the holidays fast approaching, perhaps an important time to remind us all about the holiday shopping scams that might be out there and tips to avoid falling victim to those. Want to bring on Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley with a focus on that in this week's Tech Support. Howley?
DAN HOWLEY: That's right, Zack. The holiday season is here and it's going to be a little different for a lot of the traditions that we have, but scammers, as you said, will still be active giving up their usual tradition of taking our money. So there's a few things you can do to avoid them, though, and I think one of the most important is whether you're buying online, which a lot of us are doing this time of year or shopping in brick and mortar stores, you're going to want to avoid paying with your debit card.
Pay with your credit card. It is absolutely one of the safest ways to make payments, and that's typically because if you use your debit card, someone can skim that. Then when they skim that, they can just start deducting money directly from your checking account. If you also have overdraft protection connected to your savings account, they can drain both of those. So don't pay with your debit card. You might get that money back, obviously, from the bank, but it's going to take you a few days. You'll be left high and dry without that cash.
Use your credit card instead, because of course, that money isn't yours. It's the credit card company's, and if you do, as an added layer of protection, use your smartphone's contactless payment software, whether that's Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay. That's even more secure, because it has a unique identifier for each transaction. Nobody can skim that.
Outside of that, avoid buying things through social media or email ads, and that's just because a lot of times you'll see these ads that seem like they're offering great deals, but in reality, they could simply be malware or ransomware in disguise. So if you see a link on social media, avoid that. If you see an email that you get where it's saying, you know, I don't know, $50,000 for a Ferrari, that's probably not correct. But avoid that. If it's a website that's saying that it's advertising these deals, go directly to that website. Make sure that it's on the up and up, and then do your shopping through there.
Outside of that, there's also delivery scams. This is something that happens any time you start to see a number of people using delivery services. Obviously, throughout the pandemic, that's been an issue, and what these do is they'll have people send out emails claiming to be from Amazon or FedEx or UPS or USPS, and saying that your delivery hasn't been made or your package has been lost. Click on this link and update your information or click on this link to go to a website to input more information. All that's doing is either, if you're clicking on the link, injecting your computer with malware or if you go to that website and you enter your information, just straight up stealing your information, because you're basically giving it to them.
So if you do see issues like that in an email, ignore them. Go to the website through which your product is being delivered or you made the purchase in the first place. That's where you'll go to get something more concrete.
And then my last two tips are if you're giving to charities this time of year, it's going to be something that a lot of people are doing, make sure that the charity is on the up and up. You might get phone calls soliciting different charitable donations. You don't know if those are always accurate. Tell the person on the other end of the line you'll give online. And then you can use something like Charity Watch. Basically that's a service that ensures that the charities are actually charities and not some kind of scam.
And then finally, if you see an ad out there giving you an idea of a product that's just too good to be true, an iPhone 12 for $100, and it's not through a carrier or something like that, ignore it. Something that's too good to be true is too good to be true, and you're just going to get scammed. In the meantime, happy shopping.
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, happy shopping, as long as you can avoid all of those things, but appreciate you walking us through it.
