Black Friday & Cyber Monday Shopping

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Shopping on-line on Black Friday and Cyber Monday has its advantages and disadvantage. You avoid crowds, but it also opens the buyer up to attacks from scams and hackers. In order to fight the Grinch use precaution when shopping on-line. Be cautious of the following:

1. Bargain emails offering gift cards and coupon deals You’ll get a lot of emails offering you free gift cards or gift cards offering crazy discounts. If if sounds to good to be true it is. Buyer Beware. The scam is to get you to enter your personal information online, so they can hack into your accounts or buy stuff in your name.

2. Bogus e-tailers. It’s important to be savvy while performing web transactions. There are some steps to make sure you are not getting ripped off:

Only buy from websites/companies you recognize and trust
If you are not familiar with a company check them out before turning over your financial information
Track consumer feedback on a company
No deal is that great it will probably be there tomorrow and maybe cost less.
Use your credit card when making online purchases so that can dispute charges if something happens with your order

3. E-cards and video greetings. Some scammers will send you e-cards or videos that download malware to your computer when you click on them. They might even come from a familiar email or Twitter account, if one of your friends gets hacked.

4. Secret shopper jobs.You might get a job offer to be a secret shopper. The perpetrators will tell you to cash the checks, go shopping, and then wire the rest of the money back to the company. While your bank clears the check and the money is available, you’ll later discover the check was forged and meanwhile you already wired money from your own account.

5. Incredible discounts from unfamiliar sites You make a purchase and give them your credit card info and they use it to buy stuff on the real site where you should have gone in the first place.