GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The fall season means online shopping is once taking place in high numbers, and it’s another opportunity for scam artists to spoil your shopping experience
This time of year, many are shopping online for NFL apparel and back to school items.
“It is the second largest shopping season of the year.”
Susan Bach Northeast Wisconsin Regional Director of the Better Business Bureau says people are sharing credit card information across various sites, in hopes of saving a buck, but scam artists are working.
“You may get some great deals online, but know that there are a lot of phony websites out there.”
Bach says fake websites will either send you nothing or counterfeit items in exchange for your hard earned money.
She says that can be done by knowing what the average price is for the items you are shopping for and it may be a better decision to pay a little more at well-known sites, to ensure you get your items.
The Better Business Bureau says there are other things to keep in mind when you are shopping online.
1. Poor-quality photos and unprofessional-looking, generic design are huge red flags that the site can’t be trusted. Look out for strange wording or spelling and grammar mistakes, as it’s common for these sites to be run out of countries where English isn’t the first language.
2. With some exceptions, most established companies have been on the Internet for years. If you’re not sure about a site, check the Wayback Machine, an archive of the Internet found at archive.org. Users can look up a website and see archived versions of the website across time.
3. Beware if the seller is requiring you to pay by money order, bitcoin, cash, wire transfer or a prepaid gift card. Reputable sites will almost always allow you to pay with secure methods, such as credit cards, debit cards or PayPal. With methods such as wire transfers, you have very little recourse to get your money back.
4. If the contact email given is a yahoo email address, or if there’s simply a form to fill out on the page instead of an address or phone number, watch out. Trusted firms and retailers typically use their company name or the site’s domain name in their email address. An international contact number is also another major sign something is amiss.
5. A trustworthy retailer will tell you how and where to return a product you’re unhappy with. Fake websites, on the other hand, will often have refund policies that are difficult to understand, hard to find or nonexistent. Of course, bad reviews from other users is one of the biggest signs that a website is fraudulent. Type the company’s name and “scam” into Google and see if there are any complaints about the site. Also, check the Better Business Bureau for reviews (bbb.org) or use our Scam Tracker tool to see if others have reported the site.
6. Go with your gut. People are often willing to defer disbelief because they want it to be true – they want the discounts they’re seeing to be real. These days, you must do a little bit of research, try to determine if the website is official before putting in your credit card info.
6. If you think you’ve already made a purchase from a fraudulent website, file a complaint with the BBB or report it to BBB Scam Tracker.
