SALT LAKE CITY — On the first day of Christmas, my true love told me: a tale on avoiding scams for free.
This holiday season, you may be ordering packages from near or as far as the North Pole, gifts for all the special people in your life. But not so fast, if you’re not in the habit of tracking your packages, you may want to start.
Scammers are looking to take advantage of the holiday package delivery frenzy.
Their methods can be unassuming. “What the scam looks like is it a text message or sometimes an email that will say that you need to click on a link to update your shipping information or it will alert you to a problem,” says Blake Young, assistant director for the Utah Division of Consumer Protection. “If you don’t include your address information, your package will be returned to the sender. Oftentimes, it is branded with the names of retailers we commonly do business with or shipping entities that we’re all familiar with.”
They may even ask you to pay a fee, an effort to make you think it will get your package to you quicker. “Even if you do pay, they’re going to charge you more than what you think you’re going to pay because it’s just fraudulent,” says Young.
Young says this type of scam can be two-fold. They’re not only trying to steal your hard-earned Christmas cash, but they want to get their hands on something even more valuable.
“What the scam is trying to do is either to get you to click on a link that will then put malicious malware on your computer or to your device or they will try to get personal information from you that they can then use in other nefarious ways,” says Young. “Typically, what they will do is get information from you that they can use to add to information that’s already been stolen about you. They may be looking for passwords, phone numbers or sometimes even a biometric voice print of you that they then use to imitate you and try and access your accounts in other places.”
But as the clock ticks to Christmas, you could be worried your packages won’t be delivered on time, and it might induce you to click a link you typically wouldn’t click.
The time crunch shouldn’t make you throw caution to the wind. “The greatest piece of advice: don’t click on anything and don’t use any contact method provided in that text message to get more information,” says Young. “If you think you have a package on the way from Amazon or Walmart, Target, any of the major retailers, go to them first, look at your orders, log into the app yourself.”
If you don’t want to log in to your app to see if there’s a problem with your shipment, call the company directly with the phone number you find, not what’s provided for you in that text or email.
