Robert Siciliano from McAfee explains how to spot holiday scams: fake retailer websites, phishing texts, counterfeit gift cards, and social media tricks. He recommends deleting suspicious texts, buying gift cards in stores, and going straight to official websites instead of clicking links.
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What are the biggest online scams you need to avoid? Who better to tell us about that than McAfee online security chief Robert Siciliano, and he joins us now from Boston. Robert, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
So tell us, I don't like to get scammed. What are the big ones I need to look for?
Well, this time of the year, bad guys are setting up fake e-tailer sites online that essentially Fake websites designed to get your credit card information, to get your personal information. Often you'll get to these fake websites either through search engines, so you do a basic organic search, and bad guys have gotten really good at putting those fake websites at the first page of search. Additionally, you might get to those fake websites via phishing emails. Emails you receive look like a legitimate retailer but are in fact fake to lure you into those sites by getting your credit card details. And via smishing.
Yeah, what is smishing? What's smishing?
Yes. So smishing is to texting what phishing is to emails. You get a smish, a text message designed to fool you or lure you into clicking a link to get a deal on some type of a product. The best thing to do is simply is to just hit delete.
I like that. Hit delete. That's something even I could do, Robert. So bogus gift cards. If you're getting your in-laws something on a gift card, you don't want it to be bogus. How do you avoid that?
So gift cards, bogus gift cards, occur when you generally buy them from these third-party websites that you aren't familiar with. You're best off buying your gift cards from the brick-and-mortar retailers right at the checkout counter or at the kiosk in the middle of the mall. It's a little risky, especially this time of the year, buying gift cards from these one-off retailers. And when you do give them, tell people to spend them immediately.
Spend them immediately in case the company isn't there anymore when you try to spend it. Now, social media scams, let's talk about that. A lot of people spending an awful lot of time on social media, perhaps too much, perhaps not, depends which way you look at it. But what can you learn about being scammed from that?
So the social media scams occur when the bad guys essentially are infecting people's pages with links that are designed to again get your personal information or to infect your actual device. So whenever you see status updates, either on someone you follow on Twitter or on somebody's Facebook page that say, you know, there's this really great deal on an iPad or an iPhone, you're best off really just to ignore that and go right to the retailer's website.
That makes a lot of sense. Now, you said bad guys. Who are the people who would try to scam you and me during holiday season, the season supposedly of good cheer?
These bad guys are actually organized criminals. It's not just, you know, your one-off criminal hacker sitting in his mom's basement. These are criminal hackers that are organized. They have a hierarchy. They have the, you know, the boss. They have the coders. They have the social engineers, the mules that take the data and they turn it into cash. These are organized criminals that are based here in the US and throughout the rest of the world. We also call them organized web mobs. And these organized web mobs are in business specifically to get our personal information, again, turning it into cash.
OK, well, hopefully everyone can— everyone who's watching this can avoid that and lots of other people too. Thank you very much, Robert Siciliano. He's the McAfee online security expert. We really appreciate your time.
