The Online shopping have become an integral part of our daily lives, offering us the convenience of receiving whatever we want directly at home. However, this exponential increase in e-commerce has also attracted the attention of fraudsters, scammers and malicious people of all kinds, who have become increasingly skilled at creating “artfully” made deceptions to defraud naive users by stealing their money and/or personal data. For Avoid online shopping scams It is essential to use your common sense and maintain high levels of caution when looking for potential “deals” by purchasing only from reliable sites, verifying the seller’s information, comparing multiple offers, using secure payment methods, being wary of counterfeiting, and checking reviews.
- 11. Analyze the reliability of e-commerce
- 22. Use secure payment methods
- 33. Don’t click on suspicious and unknown links
1. Analyze the reliability of e-commerce
The first piece of advice we give you is to buy only from trusted sites. And if you are wondering how you can analyze the reliability of an e-commercehere are five points to analyze carefully, shared in an article that appeared on Forbes from Rebecca Taylorincident awareness officer at cybersecurity firm Secureworks:
- Product price: A price that is too low compared to similar items could indicate a scam, especially if the discount is not common elsewhere.
- Website age: a brand new site could be a sign of a scam that has been set up recently (obviously this is not always true, but it could be a clue to evaluate carefully). To check the age of a site, just use specific tools, such as the one from Whois.com, which allow you to find the registration date of a domain in a few simple clicks.
- Website Security: make sure the site uses the protocol HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) and show the symbol of the padlock in the browser address bar, indicating that the website uses a secure connection. The presence of the HTTPS protocol is not enough to sleep soundly while visiting an online portal of any kind; if the HTTP protocol is present (without the “S”), clearly, that is a rather important clue that should push you not to buy from a site that does not offer a secure connection.
- Contact Methods: the lack of contact information (phone number, company address, email address, VAT number and any other essential data) is a huge warning sign. If these are present but, after doing some online research, you suspect that they are fake, it is better to change the online store from which you buy. Therefore, make sure that the page you are visiting (typically at the bottom) contains this data.
- Website Completeness: expert Taylor suggests looking for privacy policy and terms and conditions pages, as well as an “About Us” section (or similar). She says, “When the information (of an online portal) they are poor, written in poor language, seem to belong to another type of company or do not even exist, better to stay away from them».
We also suggest that you pay attention to the domain name of the site you are purchasing from. Scammers, in fact, sometimes purchase domains whose names are very similar to famous and reliable online portals, thus deceiving the most careless users. To be clear, if you intend to purchase products from Amazon.it or from eBay.itplease be careful that you are not purchasing from Anazom.com or from eeBay.it (for the record, these are not yet registered domains).
2. Use secure payment methods
Even if a site seems reasonably trustworthy to you, when making online purchases we advise you to use secure payment methodswhich can adequately protect you from potential problems. Use a credit card or, even better, a payment platform like PayPaloffers you additional protection in case your order does not arrive or arrives damaged. Bank transfers are less secure. If you buy products online from private users (for example on “classic” online classifieds boards), never agree to pay outside the platform (for example by recharging the private seller’s prepaid card) and always prefer the use of secure and traceable systems such as those mentioned above.
3. Don’t click on suspicious and unknown links
Sometimes an online purchase may be encouraged by the arrival of emails advertising amazing offers. These may sometimes hide phishing attempts. This very often occurs in conjunction with periods of heavy discounts — such as the Black FridayL’Amazon Prime Day, eBay Cyber Monday and so on. The best way to defend yourself from these attempts is Don’t click on suspicious linksespecially if they are introduced to us via email or social media.
