Online holiday shopping brings wide variety of scams as well as goods

If you are planning to spend money online this holiday season, beware of scams that range from fake delivery texts to ads for nonexistent products. Now is the time to be especially careful when a deal looks too good to be true.

Experts warn that we should be particularly cautious if we are among the 100 million Americans expected to shop directly on social media.

“A lot of those advertisements are essentially fake brands which are being marketed,” said Abhishek Karnik, director of threat research and response at McAfee.

Watch out, he said, for fake celebrity endorsements generated by artificial intelligence, sales on hot items that are too good to be true and companies that ask for cryptocurrency or gift cards in payment.

Because often, “the product doesn’t exist, it doesn’t ever get delivered to you. Or if it does get delivered, it could be of substandard quality,” Karnik said.

According to the AARP, a Marketplace sponsor, about 82% of consumers have been the target or victim of a scam in the last year.

“If you’re superinterested in an ad from a company you haven’t heard of before, open up your web browser and type in that company name with the word ‘scam’ next to it,” advised Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention programs for the advocacy group for older Americans.

Also be careful when you are expecting a delivery, Stokes said. There’s a common scam in which criminals use texts about a “delayed delivery” to steal your info.

“That text message that says, ‘This is the U.S. Postal Service,’ or ‘It’s UPS’ or ‘It’s FedEx, there’s a problem with the package. We can’t get it to you. We need you to click on this link or call this phone number,'” she said.

And scams don’t end on Black Friday. Be careful on Giving Tuesday as well, said Sara Rathner, a credit cards expert at NerdWallet.

“There are scammers that pose as legitimate charities, and they try to solicit donations from you and steal your credit card information,” Rathner said.

Rather than clicking through an email that seems to support a good cause, she said, first check to make sure that the nonprofit is real and go directly to the charity’s website to donate.

Finally, watch out for the less malicious holiday “scams” that are kind of just marketing tricks.

“The sales that you are seeing aren’t necessarily sales,” said Mara Einstein, author of “Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults.”

“So the price may be up at the beginning of November, and then they will take it down at the end of November,” Einstein said.

She warned that we shouldn’t let the fear of missing out on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale trick us into buying stuff that’s not on our list.