The holiday season means it’s a time for giving but for scammers, the holidays can be a time for taking.
Thieves are turning to the internet, social media, text messages and more to pull off sophisticated rip-offs.
A new 2024 AARP Fraud Watch Network report highlights the ways criminals are targeting consumers this holiday season.
News 6′s Lisa Bell spoke with AARP’s Director of Fraud Prevention Programs Kathy Stokes to share tips on how to spot and avoid scams and provide advice on what to do if you’ve already been targeted by fraud.
Bell: AARP just released its 2024 Fraud Watch Network report and it found some pretty staggering numbers. It shows four in five, some 82%, of U.S. consumers have experienced some type of fraud this year alone and that’s whether it’s gift card scams, counterfeit products, phishing attempts and more. That seems like a lot of people? 82%?
Stokes: That 82% is they’ve either been targeted or they’ve actually experienced a loss, but it just goes to show you that it’s ubiquitous. Everybody, almost everybody, has experienced some form of being targeted or victimized by fraud in this country.
Bell: When it comes to the holidays, what type of fraud do you see most frequently?
Stokes: I think a lot of it is in the online shopping space. Our survey says that about half of us will make a purchase or have made a purchase through an online ad on social media, but a third of us who’ve done that have experienced fraud. So, it just seems to me that that’s not a safe way to shop.
Bell: So what can you do? I mean, we’re all inundated about that by our feeds, right? We see some great product that seems to have thousands of reviews and comments of people loving this product, loving this company. What can you do to protect yourself in a situation like that?
Stokes: Well, if it says it’s an ad from Target, don’t click on the link. Go to target.com. If you want to sort of check it out a little bit more, put the name of that company or the product in your web browser with the word “scam” or “fraud” and you’ll be surprised at how good that is at ferreting out some of these scam websites.
Bell: We know, year after year, one of the top gifts is a gift card, right? People try to make it easy for someone, but according to this report, 29% of adults have either given or received a gift card that turned out to not have any balance on it. Why is that? How does that happen? And what can people do to protect themselves?
Stokes: It happens in one of two ways. It can happen in a retail store where criminals will take those cards off the rack. They will expose the back of those cards and record what they have there, put them back on the rack, and then just wait for them to be purchased. And as soon as that card that’s been manipulated like that goes to the register, they get pinged, and they drain the funds. And then, sort of even more scary, they have these, what they call a ghost bot, that will go online and search for cards that have balances on them and drain the balances. So, a couple of things about gift cards. If you’re going to buy one from a retail store, don’t buy it from the front of the rack. Buy it from the back. Go into a store that has that rack close to the cashier, thinking that maybe criminals wouldn’t be so likely to affect those cards. And when you’re buying them, tell the person that you’re giving them to, ‘hey, go ahead and check the balance.’ And if there’s not a balance there, talk to the retailer or the issuer, because sometimes you actually do get your money back talking to them and use the card when you get it, we tend to let them languish, right? And that just gives the criminals more time to drain them.
Bell: Yeah, and I know you typically have the option of getting a receipt when you purchase even a gift receipt when you purchase a gift card. Is that something you should be doing and then giving that gift receipt to the person you’re giving it to?
Stokes: Absolutely. That’s a really good point. You should hold on to that receipt. Sometimes it may be that there was an error at the cash register, and they can fix it, but you want to have the proof of what what was loaded on there.
Bell: We know certain cash apps like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, have become even more popular, and I have to imagine, even more so during the holidays, some people might be trying to buy things secondhand online, whether it’s through Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist or somewhere else. What do people need to be mindful of when trying to use these apps?
Stokes: That they’re not intended for you to use them with a business you’ve never done business with before. Credit cards are the way to go with that, because they do have consumer protections. If you buy something off of Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and you used Cash App or Venmo and you never get that product, you don’t have any recourse where you do with a credit card company.
Bell: That is just heartbreaking for some people, because once they discover that that money has been drained from their account, as you noted, it’s really impossible to get it back in there if you’re using something like Zelle.
Stokes: Yeah, what you really need to be focusing on with those apps is is transferring money to people that you know, or businesses that you have worked with in the past that you can trust, otherwise you just don’t have the protections.
Bell: These scams have become so sophisticated. I personally was just hit by one. Someone somehow managed to change my husband’s cell phone number and then change all of our accounts. So what sort of advice do you know? Thank goodness, we had notifications set up on our phone so we could see people actually making purchases in real time using all of our accounts. But what advice do you have for consumers to protect themselves? I mean, it seems like there aren’t a ton of safeguards out there.
Stokes: That’s the problem, right? It’s sort of on us to try to figure out how to be safe online when it really should be up to the social media companies and the tech companies and the banks and the credit card companies to better protect us. But knowledge is power. Knowing what to do to protect yourself you mentioned, you know, being able to see what was happening on your phone. If you bank online, you have the opportunity to check your account anytime that you want. Some people think, I’m not going to bank online because that’s dangerous, but it’s actually dangerous if you don’t, because someone could set up that access instead of you and have access to your accounts.
Bell: Even if you get through the purchasing process without getting scammed or ripped off, and you actually get a package delivered to your front door. According to this report that you guys just put out, one in four U.S. adults say they have had a package stolen from outside their door, which is kind of crazy, because in this day and age, everyone seems to have a doorbell camera. We can see people doing this. Do you have any recourse as a consumer, if that happens to you, and what should you do?
Stokes: I don’t believe you do have any recourse and even if you catch it on your camera, you don’t know who that was. What are you going to do with that? You know you can’t if you ask the police to do something about it, they’ll be like, sorry, we’ve got other things to do. There are things that you can do to mitigate that. You can have things held back at the at the post office, and you can go pick it up. If you’re shopping with Amazon, you know, they have those Amazon what are those lockers in a lot of places? You know, just look for ways or you can even tell the deliverer, ‘put it under the bush, put it around the back of the house,’ yeah, some way that it’s just not that obvious.
Bell: And I want to touch on a point that you guys point out in this report, in terms of providing your personal login information if you call customer service and you need to log into something, when should you be providing that information, and when should you not be providing that information?
Stokes: 100% of the time you should not be providing that information. No retailer, no tech support, is going to ask you for your username and your password. They just don’t do that. It’s a huge risk. And if that’s the position you’re in, disengage. It’s fraud.
Bell: And I guess just finally, if you do find out that you’ve been a victim of fraud, whether it’s your credit card has been compromised or someone has stolen something from you, who is the first person you should turn to in that situation?
Stokes: If the fraud involved a bank account, you should call your bank right away and see what they might be able to do to pull the transaction back if it hasn’t been completed. But if you don’t know what to do call the AARP Fraud Watch Network. We get like 100,000 calls every year and we help consumers who aren’t sure whether or not something is legitimate or they just want to report a scam. And sadly, we talked to a lot of people who have been victimized, and we help them to report it to the right authority and help even with emotional recovery with the program that we have.
Bell: Well, that is good news, and I can tell you, in my case, which happened just last week, within minutes of these scammers trying to take $2,500 we were able to contact our banks and get all of that money returned. So you got to be proactive and be checking your accounts and not ignoring those notifications, those push alerts that you get on your phone.
Stokes: Absolutely watch for those push alerts.
Bell: All right, Kathy, thank you so much and happy and safe holidays to you.