Imagine someone comes up to you and asks, “Hello, can I have your home address, personal email, and phone number?”
That’s essentially a question online forms ask us constantly, just packaged in a different, digital way.
“Imagine having that same conversation on the street corner somewhere. Imagine someone running up to you and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I have the best investment opportunity for you right now. All I need is $100,000 wired to my account and I will make you a millionaire.’ You would step back and tell them to get out of your space,” Amy Nofziger, the Director of Fraud Victim Support for the AARP Fraud Watch Network, said. “But for some reason… when they’re faceless online, we do put more trust in them. So take any of those situations, put them in real life, and I guarantee you’ll walk away.”
Both Nofziger and Roseann Freitas, a spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau (BBB), said online scams are currently on hyperdrive. Both said there aren’t significant reports of “new” scams, but are taking advantage of consumers during the holiday shopping season.
“Our focus is not on our financial security and safety, at this time,” Nofziger said. “Our focus is on getting the perfect gift… It’s really us that is under this pressure and this frenzy. We need to pay attention to ourselves.”
Freitas said recent BBB data shows young adults — ages 18-24 — have the highest median losses from fraud out of any age group.
“They’ve grown up with technology. They are very comfortable shopping online. This is nothing new. And because of social media, they’re more comfortable sharing that personal information,” Freitas said. “There are questions obviously that they have to ask you: your name, your address… your credit card. However, nobody should need to know more than that (i.e. Social Security numbers).”
“I would say about 40% of our phone calls are coming from people under the age of 50,” Nofziger said. “People are realizing that fraud impacts everyone of every age.”
Freitas recommends never clicking on a link you have sent to you via email or phone. Instead, she recommends going to a browser and finding the site yourself. The other option is to type out the URL character by character.
While Freitas acknowledges the hassle of doing so, she said, “It’s your money. And at the end of the day, we have to protect it.”
The golden rule, according to Freitas: thinking logically, not emotionally.
That same mindset should be used in the “real world,” as well, according to Nofziger.
“We still hear from people who have been victimized through the mail, at the door, in person, or still over the phone,” she said.
“Especially with AI, they can make it sound so convincing,” Freitas said. “It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not real. Just because that’s happening doesn’t mean we should be scared to shop. It just means we have to not trust everything we see.”
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