Three Common Online Shopping Scams to Avoid


Most people, who are looking for daily deals, are constantly in the lookout for the best products and online promotions. Every day, advertisements of popular products and services are constantly flashed on websites yet there are retailers that employ dodgy and oftentimes bad business practices to cash in on gullible customers. There is a growing demand for websites that offer the best items online, especially during the Christmas and New Year’s Day holiday rush. Avoid online shopping scams and consider a reliable daily deals search site.

Common scams usually victimise naive customers that don’t know how online retailing and business works. The advent of social networking allowed business owners to run their operations in that way. Nowadays, online shopping has become riskier activity than ever before. Despite the effort by authorities to clamp down online shopping fraud, many fake retailers are still wreaking havoc online. Since some stores implement different scam schemes, you have to look out before you start your online shopping search:

Social Networking Scam Links

Most of us use Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis yet we fail to realise that there are many scams that victimise users. Scammers usually use link baits in order to force or convince someone to click the link. Be extra careful when providing your personal information as identity theft and phishing techniques may capture your personal details. Many fake links provide products and services with great discounts. Beware of online auction scams that force you to bid on something that is not what was advertised.

Smishing

Since most mobile phone users use SMS to communicate with their friends and family, some fraudulent retailers take advantage of this by ‘phishing’ sensitive information from victims. Some of them provide malwares designed to get contact information and other private data from the victim. Victims are usually led to believe as winners of a particular contest sent via an anonymous text message when this is just ruse to convince them to send their private information.

Outdated Browers

Hackers, who implement Internet shopping fraud, take advantage of outdated browsers because of the security breaches and outdated scripts. Older browsers are not good in filtering malicious sites and determining which site is legitimate and which one is not. Some conmen will make a fake website to look like the website you want to visit. If you thought that iBay.com is really eBay.com then you will probably become the newest victim of this type of online shopping scam.

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