Consider This from NPR - Holidays shopping brings out the scammers. Here's how to stay safe

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

With just a handful of shopping days until Christmas, millions are making last minute online purchases. Unfortunately 'tis also the season for financial and identity theft. We ask an expert how you can avoid the scams.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Recently, Peter O'Dowd got this voicemail. Hey, this is Amelia from Walmart. A pre-authorized purchase of PlayStation 5 with special edition and Pulse 3D headset is being ordered from your Walmart account for an amount of $919.45. To cancel your order or to connect with one of our customer support representatives, please press 1. Peter is our colleague, an editor at NPR's Here and Now. He did not order a PlayStation. He does not have a Walmart account. And he rightly guessed that Amelia was AI. The call

was a scam. Had he returned the call, he might have heard something like this. Oh, you did not order. Oh, okay. Can you please give us your credit card details so that we can cancel your order? And then they take it from there and they try to get as much personal as financial information as possible from you. As CEO of scamadvisor.com and managing director of the Global Scam Alliance, George Abraham tracks attempts to separate you from your money and your personal information. It doesn't matter what your education level or how old you are, there's always one moment

in your life that a scammer finds you at the right time with the right message to scam you. For Kelly Richmond Pope, that one moment was a few years ago when Bruno Mars was appearing in her city. So she went to the Ticketmaster website and she managed to get fantastic seats cheap. So my cousin and I go to the Bruno Mars concert, we're super excited. We get in, go through the United Center door and we get a big X over the ticket. You guessed it, the tickets were fake.

And when I go back and I think what happened, the tickets were fake. If you think you would never fall for that, take Kelly Richmond-Pope's story as a cautionary tale. She is a professor of forensic accounting. And my area of expertise is fraud, forensic accounting, and white-collar crime. Consider this. If even people who study scams for a living

are not immune to getting scammed, what chance do the rest of us stand? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. You care about what's happening in the world. Let State of the World from NPR keep you informed. Each day we transport you to a different point on the globe and introduce you to the people living world events. We don't just tell you world news, we take you there. And you can make this journey while you're doing the dishes or driving your car.

State of the World podcast from NPR. There are just a handful of shopping days left until Christmas and millions of us are getting online, pulling out our credit cards, and clicking buy. The National Retail Federation predicts holiday sales could be up by 2.5% to 3.5% from last year. Unfortunately, with all this seasonal shopping comes more opportunity for financial and identity theft. Kelly Richmond-Pope, as you heard, is professor of forensic accounting at DePaul University in Chicago. I talked to her earlier this month about ways to protect yourself from online fraud as you do your holiday shopping. Start with the why. Why do we see scams rise around the holidays?

Is that just simple math? More purchases means more scamming opportunities? Absolutely. I mean, we see an increased amount of spending, and that really is the driving force behind why we see more scams during the holiday season. And who is being scammed? Who's most vulnerable? So here's the thing, everybody, whether it's teenagers, whether it's young adults, the elderly, everyone is vulnerable because we are such in the holiday spirit, we're more

trusting and we are just buying, buying, buying. There are these websites that just sort of reach out to us and speak to us. We want to help charities. So we are just buying, buying, buying. There are these websites that just sort of reach out to us and speak to us. We want to help charities. So we are just in this giving season. So all of those things really fuel the scam industry, if you will. What about, I repeatedly in the last month kept getting texts from quote unquote Amazon

and not to rip on Amazon, but kept telling me, hey, we tried to deliver your package, we couldn't. And I'm thinking, I don't remember ordering from Amazon, but who knows? So like the instinct is let me click on it and make sure I get my package. I tell you what I do is I try to keep a list of everything that I've purchased in a certain week

or a certain time period. So I make the purchase and then I pay attention to when should the package come. So I just try to keep a mental log, maybe just a little Excel spreadsheet, maybe even use the notes app in your phone so you can keep track of those purchases because what that scammer is hoping that you do is forget and second guess yourself. And so I try not to let that happen to myself by just really being diligent about the notes I take so that when I get something from West Elm that says, hey, we tried to deliver something, my first instinct is to say, well, I didn't order anything from

West Elm. Another thing to watch for fake websites, websites that look really close to the website you were trying to get onto and buy something but aren't quite right. And this is the thing, there are some really good fake websites now, but you have to pay attention. Pay attention to the tone of the website. Pay attention even to the website address because sometimes there's one character that's slightly different that would let you know that it's a fraudulent website.

So if I were wanting to make a donation, I would do some research on the charity to make sure it is a legitimate charity before you give any information, especially any personal identification information like your credit card, your address, your social security number. Like if they're asking for some of those things,

be very, very vigilant and go to the actual website. If there's a phone number, call it because the last thing you ever want is for someone to steal your identity. Any other top tips for us to keep top of mind as we navigate holiday shopping season? Just slow down because one of the things that scammers really prey on is urgency. So they think, hey, you need to act fast, or you're going to miss out on this deal. You're probably not going to miss out.

Read the fine print, make sure the website is right, pay attention to the tone, pay attention to who sent the message to you. Because a lot of times, the red flags are staring us right in the face, but our hurry just makes us overlook things that are just staring at us. So just slow down. I guess another top tip would be get off your sofa, get off your computer and just walk into

the dang store. Makes it a lot harder to be the victim of online fraud. It does. Just take five seconds, take a deep breath, read it a little bit closer before you click. If it seems suspicious, it probably is. Don't click. Professor Kelly Richmond-Pope is author of Fool Me Once, Scam Stories and Secrets from the Trillion Dollar Fraud Industry. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. And happy shopping.

This episode was produced by Connor Donovan, Thomas Donnie-Ellion, and Claire Marie Schneider. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and John Ketchum. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider This Plus at plus.npr.org.

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