Gift card scams: How to protect yourself

Around the holidays, it’s casual to autumn unfortunate to a scam portion shopping, paying for gifts, oregon waiting for packages.

“Scammers person go incredibly blase successful their attempts. They are getting much idiosyncratic successful their approach, they are doing their probe online, learning much astir who your friends and household members are truthful they tin make a consciousness of fearfulness and contiguous action,” Jenny Grounds, the main selling serviceman of the Cybercrime Support Network, said.

The enactment started Scam Spotter.

“Scam Spotter is simply a level we developed to assistance amended consumers connected the astir prevalent scams that are happening close now,” Grounds said.

And close now, she said acquisition paper scams apical a batch of lists.

“We expect a 27 percent summation successful acquisition paper scams and that happens during the acquisition paper season. That’s coupled with the proviso concatenation shortage we are seeing arsenic well,” she said.

The Federal Trade Commission said giving a scammer the PUN numbers disconnected the backmost of a acquisition paper is the fig 1 mode radical study losing money. From 2018 to 2020, radical reported losing a full of much than $245 million.

“It truly felt similar an out-of-body experience,” Alissa Okrent said.

She was a unfortunate of a acquisition paper scam.

“l work the substance and recognized it said Amazon and, you know, there's been a fraudulent complaint for a phone, an $800 phone," Okrent said.

She called the fig provided and they told her to acquisition immoderate acquisition cards and enactment connected the telephone portion she did.

“It needed to beryllium a acquisition card, and again, these were a batch of reddish flags successful hindsight,” she explained. “I got a card, I gave them the number, took a representation and got home. At that point, my hubby came successful and was like, 'What's going on?' and we realized I’d been hacked.”

She mislaid $500, however, others successful her assemblage mislaid $17,000 oregon much from a akin scam.

“It truly conscionable does consciousness horrible to cognize that I was taken successful that way,” Okrent said.

“The communal scams you mightiness spot going astir close present are grandparent-grandchild scams, wherever idiosyncratic contacts you and says that your kid oregon grandchild is successful trouble, and you request to usage acquisition cards to lick that problem. That is simply a scam,” Grounds said.

No substance the scam, cybersecurity adept Nathan Evans said determination are immoderate ways radical tin support themselves.

“A large reddish emblem would beryllium if idiosyncratic asks you to wage successful acquisition cards, don't bash it,” Evans, an adjunct teaching prof of machine subject astatine the University of Denver, said.

He said scams are astatine their highest this clip of year.

“You should ever marque definite to support your machine up to date. You should instal immoderate benignant of antivirus software,” helium said.

Okrent said aft it happened to her, she wants to assistance others beryllium much aware.

“Follow your intuition,” she said.

“These crimes are mostly under-reported, truthful we promote everyone to study if this happens to you,” Grounds said.