For some on Santa’s naughty list, the holiday shopping season is the scam season – especially online.
Why, even you or I could pretend to be Amazon.com.
“It could be any web site. It could be a bank. It could be a storefront,” says Price McCarty, a supervisory special agent with the Springfield field office of the FBI. “We would encourage everybody to navigate directly to the site that they want to go to, that you found, rather than simply trusting (a link in) the email that purports to be from Amazon.”
Gift cards are at the center of many scams.
“That label that covers the PIN or the card ID number,” adds McCarty, “you want to make sure that’s intact before you buy the card. It’s a gift card, not a payment card. So if the scammer is looking for you to make some form of payment, that should be a red flag.”
Repeating – no reputable person or seller will ask you to pay for something via gift card.
McCarty says, as with any scam, all the bad guys need is for someone to trust them to get tricked.