Doing any online holiday shopping? Watch out for gift card bots and fake websites scams

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- The holiday shopping season is here and so are the scams. You have to use extreme caution, especially when shopping online as technology has made it easier to scam and harder for you to detect the schemes.

According to the National Retail Federation, a record 183.4 million people plan to shop in-store and online from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday this year.

A large percentage of those shoppers will buy online, including from ads on social media. Abhishek Karnik, the head of Threat Research and Intelligence for McAfee, an online protection company says the non-delivery scams are a big problem, "You know where you order something online, and it may never show up these scams may proliferate through, you know. Fake impersonated websites like somebody posing as the Tiktok shop, or somebody trying to create a fake brand."

He adds that AI-generated technology helps scammers trick shoppers.

"Too good to be true prices, excellent reviews, and they can be advanced as deepfake celebrity endorsements. Big and luxurious brands are often impersonated to fool consumers," Karnik adds. One way to detect a scam is when it comes to payment if you're asked to go off the current shopping platform. He adds, "You start with Amazon, but then you end up on a WhatsApp group. Well, that's a that's a big red flag."

One of the most popular gifts to give and receive is gift cards. Kathy Stokes with AARP says, "30% of us have experienced in the last 12 months giving or receiving a card that doesn't have any value on it." Stokes says that's according to AARP's latest Fraud Watch Report.

Stokes suggests you should always buy gift cards from trusted retailers and take a good look at the gift card's front and back to make sure it has not been tampered with.

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"The criminals can take the cards off the rack in the retail stores and expose the information on the back, cover it back up, and just wait for people to buy them, and they get a ping, and they drain the funds as soon as it's bought."

Stokes says scammers are even using ghost bots to drain gift cards. "They target stores, you know, a.com company and will go to the gift card section and just bounce around in there until they find a card that has value and just drain it right off."

If you get a gift card, register it right away if you can and check the balance to make sure it's all there. Use it right away, don't hold on forever. Another shopping tip is always to pay with a credit card as that gives the most protection.

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