Robert Siciliano from McAfee breaks down holiday shopping scams: fake retailer sites, malicious apps, gift card fraud, and smishing texts. He explains how to spot them and why sticking with established retailers matters most.
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All right, Black Friday is now behind us, so are you ready for Cyber Monday? Well, online scam artist star will tell you what to watch out for when you're shopping online.
Well, it's practically become a holiday of its own, waking up from a turkey coma and shopping for deals on Black Friday. In fact, the National Retail Federation estimates 147 million shoppers are expected to hit stores throughout this weekend, and according to McAfee Security, Holiday shopping online is expected to climb about 12% this year to $96 billion. Yes, that is with a B, dollars. McAfee's online security expert Robert Siciliano joins me now with 12 scams of Christmas to avoid while holiday shopping. So millions are shopping online this weekend, Robert, and numbers are only expected to rise, uh, come Cyber Monday. So at the top of your list of things to watch out for are social media scams. Explain those.
So bad guys are creating fake social media pages with too-good-to-be-true offers and then luring in unsuspecting victims with offers via status updates to your friends' pages. Once you click on those links, it can infect your page and infect your PC. Just delete those links, don't go to those status updates, and be careful out there.
All right, that's good advice. What about malicious mobile apps? I mean, we're downloading apps all the time on our phones and and things.
Yet recent studies show that as much as 33% of mobile apps are actually sharing information that you'd rather not, like your location. Uh, they are actually, um, uh, when you download these apps, they can even infect your mobile device with spyware. So only download mobile applications from, say, Google Play or Apple iTunes, uh, whereas if you go to third-party sites and download applications, essentially Your device can be infected. Also be aware of what information you're communicating on certain apps, uh, and always update your mobile device with antivirus as well.
And a lot of people, of course, during the holiday season, they love to get those gift cards, but you say some of them are bogus.
Yeah, bad guys are creating fake e-tailer websites, and these fake sites are designed to get you to enter your credit card information. And often these fake sites revolve around gift cards. So if you're searching out a gift card, you end up on a on one of these third-party sites, you don't know if that site's gonna be there the next day. Basically, you should buy your gift cards at the kiosk at the mall or at the brick-and-mortar store, places that you know, like, and trust, and always tell your, um, the people who receive your gifts to spend them immediately.
And, you know, we've heard the term phishing before, um, in our emails, but now there's this holiday term called smishing. Explain that one.
Yes. So smishing is to text messages what phishing is to emails. Basically, bad guys send you out text messages designed to get you to visit a website. But once you click on these links, a couple things could happen. A, you could download a virus right to your device, your mobile device, essentially infecting it with the spyware that spies on your activity on your mobile device. Or it'll bring you to a website that eventually you'll plug in your information and ultimately giving away your credit card data. Anytime you receive a text message for any type of an offer, just hit delete. If you receive a text message to update your device, just hit delete because your carrier is not going to send you that text. Yeah, always be careful out there. And again, update your device with antivirus as well.
That delete button is your friend this time of year, no doubt. What about certain sites and deals you think we can trust? What do you like?
So I always will do business again with those who I know, like, and trust. You know, you, you— there's certain websites out there like eBay and Amazon and Best Buy and others that you've been to, you're familiar with. When you type their address in the address bar and it comes out, you know, like it should, as it's spelled, that's where you want to go. Doing searches on the first page of search, generally you're going to find legitimate retail sites. It's when you dig a lot deeper, it's when you get emails regarding fake sites, you have to be aware of. So just, again, do business with those who you know, like, and trust, who your favorites are.
All right, great advice, Robert Siciliano. Thank you so much.
