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New York – The pandemic has also meant a window of opportunity for scammers. Thieves are trying to take advantage of the rise in online shopping by creating sleek looking websites where they pretend to sell new devices, toys, cleaning supplies and anything else in high demand.
To lure unwary people to fake sites and deceive them, scammers pay for ads on Facebook, Google and other sites.
Ben Black lives in Westminster, Colorado. Committed online what he thought was a drone at a good price, but his purchase never came. The site stopped responding to his emails and never recovered his $ 100. They swindled him.
“I’m angry because I was deceived,” Black said.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported receiving a number of style reports for online shopping in April and May, mostly from people who were tricked into trying to buy masks, all disinfectants and other pandemic-related supplies that never arrived.
So far this year, the FTC has received more than 37,000 reports of online shopping fraud, equivalent to $ 27 million in losses. The number has increased every year since 2015, with a cumulative $ 420 million in losses.
The best way to avoid a scam is to know what to look for. If the product or service is on a website you have never understood before, do an online search for the website number along with the words “scam” or “fraud.”
Check the site’s social media to see if there are any customer complaints. To understand the United States, try the Bett Business Bureau’s https://www.bbb.org/scamtracker page, which allows you to search for business names and read anything. Another thing you can do is read the “About Us” page of the site. If there are spelling mistakes or meaningless sentences they are warning signs.
Scammers offer lower prices on highly sought after products knowing that buyers will find it difficult to resist. However, if the price is too good to be true, it is probably a hoax, advises Katherine Hutt, spokeswoman for Better Business Bureau.
If you are already being scammed, call your credit card company to decline the charges and try to get a refund. You can also report the site to the Better Business Bureau and FTC pages, which could help others not fall into the trap.