Avoid these online shopping scams!

The rate of online scams these days is quite alarming. A lot of customers are being stripped of their hard-earned money daily. There have been more records of people being scammed when buying online, unlike their counterparts that buy in physical stores. The recurring occurrence of this has made a lot of individuals very sceptical about using online sites for their shopping.

What are online scams?

These are ways by which people are defrauded or taken advantage of on an online platform for gain. There are quite many names that it is called, an example of such is cybercrime. Its occurrence is not peculiar to only online shopping websites. Other sites such as dating apps, tech platforms and many more also fall victim to these frauds. 

Online scams from shopping in the USA could come in different forms for shoppers. In some cases, victims are stripped of their money while for some others, they do not fulfil their promise of an offer to them. 

The different online scam types to look out for

Fake shopping websites

Some of these cyber thieves are quite talented and extreme in achieving what they want to. They would design a nice and sophisticated web design and layout that look genuine to users. These designed websites are fake retailer websites that were designed to lure customers to the sites. 

Another rather common attribute is deals that are too attractive. They offer goods at ridiculously low prices or offer deals that seem quite the catch. They do all these in a bid to attract the customer. In the end, after making payments; the customer either doesn’t receive any goods for payment made. Or you receive fake items that cannot be what you paid for. 

You can avoid this by deliberately and carefully scrutinising different customer feedback before patronising them. 

Phishing mails

For this scam, you would get a message, most likely a mail, from a seemingly legitimate store. The message will offer you mouth-watering deals and you would be required to provide certain personal information such as your bank details, card details and even passwords. 

One way to recognize this is the bad construction of the mails. The mails are often made of bad grammar, misspellings, and wrong logos. If you look well, you would find the loops in them. 

As such, you are advised to avoid replying to strange mails, neither should you subscribe to the different links flying up and about. It is best that you avoid operations from third parties or redirected links. 

You should also take every possible step in protecting yourself. Don’t patronise businesses that do not have special security features to secure your information 

 You should also protect your device from malware and viruses by ensuring that you have updated antivirus programs installed on your device. 

 The best online platform to perform operations is from the official website of the store. Even at this, you are still required to be careful of the kind of information you provide. Knowledge of these online scams would go a long way in avoiding them