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Don’t let porch pirate scammers ruin your vacation

Umito November 17, 2024

Aren’t vacations great? All that togetherness, dining, shopping, freebies, email and text scams, scam deals, scam websites, and people snatching up freebies right outside your door. Okay, maybe it’s a mixed bag. What you need is a quick reminder and some tactics to avoid all the bad so you can enjoy the holiday season.

A recent study from online security company McAfee found that more than half of Americans have received fraudulent package delivery messages (or claim to have “delivery issues”). Fraudulent messages about credit card problems have been sent to more than a third of all Americans. A similar number have seen fraudulent messages regarding their Amazon shopping activity.

It’s the Black Friday holiday shopping jungle.

Start with a cleaning

Scammers target us all year round, with extra effort reserved for the holidays. By sharing less, you can undermine their efforts now and in the months to come (until it’s the holidays again). Stop taking those social media surveys that ask you to name your favorite color, your first pet, your first car, or your hometown. Any of these details could be used to help them impersonate you or, more likely, to convince you that a text or email is actually from a trusted entity or friend.

Go through your social media accounts and delete any posts that say more about you than you should and remain more mysterious in the future. All of this will make you less of a target this holiday shopping season.

Nothing is real

Emails promising great deals from your favorite retail sites might be too good to be true. Scammers create fake sites that look like the real ones but are designed only to scam you, steal your information, etc.

Instead of following links from unexpected emails or text messages, always enter the URLs of your favorite shopping sites. If you end up on a questionable site, check the URL. Instead of “Amazon.com”, you may notice that it is “Amazon.eo”. Also take a look at the product photos on the site. If they appear to be of poor quality, they may have been collected elsewhere.

Be wary of typos and spelling errors, which are often a giveaway to fake sites. If the prices are too good to be true, well, they’re probably too good to be true.

If there is no recognizable and secure payment method, run away.

Perhaps the easiest way to avoid coming across these fake sites is to find your Best Black Friday Deals via reputable sites like the one you are currently on.

Your package is on its way

By now, most of us have received emails or text messages telling us that our package is on its way, but there is a problem. Any gift will not be delivered until you provide additional information. Sometimes there are links to follow, and other times there is a phone number to call.

First, carefully keep track of everything you order during the holiday season. If you receive one of these emails, check this command list. Second, visit the original retailer and check the status of your order there.

If you have a shipping tracking number for FedEx, DHL, UPS or USPS, visit the appropriate shipping site and enter your tracking number there. This will give you an accurate status of the package.

You owe us

Most of the text messages I receive now, other than random ones that seem to be from a trusted friend (they’re not), claim that I owe Amazon hundreds of dollars for an order I didn’t have. never passed.

Again, the easiest way to check this is to visit Amazon.com and check your account and order status. Amazon keeps perfect records, and you’ll quickly see that you don’t owe them anything – unless, of course, you ordered a huge Amazon haul and in that case… what did you buy from me?

Problem with your account

Some banks will send you an alert if there is suspicious activity on your account, especially during this busy holiday season. Credit card violations often result in someone buying gifts with your card number, and this is usually done in a location far away from you, which is how the bank notices it (credit card numbers are an easy way to protect yourself when shopping online). .

Even so, if and when these alerts come, regardless of the source of the text, never respond to them or even call a provided number. Always go back to your bank’s website and call the numbers you have there or in any document the bank has sent directly to your home.

Bad advice

A recent study states that 54% of Gen Z buyers will get their shopping advice from TikTok, and a quarter of them will buy based on influencer recommendations. And you know what else is on the rise? Deepfake product and shopping recommendations. I’ve seen a few, like “Oprah” selling hair oil and “Selena Gomez” trying to get rid of a warehouse full of Le Creuset jars. In both cases, scammers use AI video and audio technology to create fake video presentations.

Scammers know how much people rely on TikTok and YouTube videos for product advice, so the number of scams will surely increase. Let’s just assume that most of the celebrity and influencer-backed deals you see are either fake or shady (with influencers sometimes being the latter).

Also talk to your teens about trusted sources and where they should and shouldn’t spend their vacation money.

Here we go

We all get packages delivered to our porches throughout the year, but the number of boxes on your stoops will increase significantly during the holiday months, and they’re catnip for porch pirates.

A Security.org study found that porch pirates stole 12 billion dollars in packages in the United States in 2023, adding that 58 million Americans have been affected.

What’s worse is that some porch pirates are no longer content to roam neighborhoods looking for unattended packages. They steal tracking numbers and use that information to know exactly when products are dropped off on stoops so they can swoop in and steal them before you even receive the notification.

There are several ways to combat this. The first is to monitor delivery alerts on your phone or email and act quickly. Another is to install one of the best video doorbells which can monitor deliveries and also people who show up to try to steal packages (you can even shout at them via the built-in mic).

Finally, you could buy one of the fruits of a growing harvest of Parcel delivery boxes. These are basically large package safes with delivery lids and locked compartments underneath that collect the packages. After delivery, you will receive a notification and, in some cases, a special PIN that you can use or share with someone else to unlock the box and collect your packages.

The most sophisticated ones can handle your a few hundred dollarsbut considering what you can lose, it’s probably money well spent.

If you follow these tips, stay vigilant, share little, and trust even less, you could have a great Black Friday holiday shopping season.

Apre-salomemanzo

Apre-salomemanzo

Don’t let porch pirate scammers ruin your vacation

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