With the Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping season here or just around the corner, spammers, and scammers have already started sending out fake promotional email messages, posting ridiculous offers on social networking websites and creating fake pop-up advertisements with links to malicious websites. These malicious websites can infect your computer with malware, steal your credit card or personal information by tricking you into entering it on a fake website.
A Fake Black Friday Auto Sale
This shopping season, ensure that you do not shop at unknown websites. These are websites that you cannot tell if they are legitimate or not. This is because it is difficult to determine if those websites were created by scammers to steal your personal and credit card information. So instead, shop at popular or well-established websites that have been around a long time.
Now, with thousands of bogus promotional emails being sent by scammers this Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to trick persons into clicking on the links in them, you should avoid clicking links in email messages with ridiculous offers. Scammers use these “too good to be true” offers to persuade the recipients of these email messages to click on them.
Also, watch out for these offers on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. You may also see these offers in pop-up advertisements when you visit certain websites online. So, avoid clicking on pop-up advertisements.
Another thing to avoid is survey scams. If you are asked to complete surveys in order to claim a gift card, take advantage of a crazy sale, discount or other promotions, please do not take these surveys. These are usually survey scams that cybercriminal use to trick persons into completing that they themselves will get paid for. You, on the other hand, will not receive what you were promised, regardless of how many surveys you complete.
So, this shopping season, be careful of the links that you click on and the websites that you visit.