Holiday scams to keep in mind while shopping

JACKSON, Tenn. – Sometimes, we may not receive what we thought we were purchasing during the holidays. AARP’s Director of Fraud Prevention, Kathy Stokes, gave us a little background information regarding this.

“Fraud is at a crisis level. It’s happening year round, not just at the holidays. But when we hit this time of year, there are some scams that happen with much greater fluency, if you will, than others. For example, we’re all online, we click on a social media ad for a gift for dad that looks really cool, but we end up not even getting that gift, or get something that’s inferior,” Stokes said.

One of the biggest gift ideas every year are gift cards. Stokes has some information on how people are getting scammed out of their gift card balance.

“And they’ve figured out ways, low tech and high, how to drain the funds off of gift cards as soon as they’re purchased. We’ve had the experience, according to our survey, of 27% of people who have either given or gotten a gift card that doesn’t have any value on it,” Stokes said.

Stokes says the best thing to do is to load your gift card onto the company’s website so you can always check your balance.

With online shopping, you might be expecting some boxes to arrive at your house on any given day.

Another scam that is happening is that you may be contacted via email or text. That message may say that something is wrong with the shipping arrangement.

“We’ve seen a doubling of people who have experienced getting a text that suggests that they have something in transit from FedEx or UPS or US Postal, and there’s a problem and you need to call a number and click on a link. Of course this time of year we’re doing a lot of shipping. So we may go like, ‘Oh, my God! My gift for my mom! I can’t get it if I don’t deal with this!’ So many of those are fake,” Stokes said. 

You should log into whatever accounts you have used to purchase items to check to see if there is a problem with any of your packages.

According to AARP, 80% of adults have experienced or been targeted by at least one form of fraud.

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