Entry #19 'Tis The Season To Be Scammed

Security

With Christmas upon us and our hearts in a state of giving and joy it is a perfect tie of year for crooks and scam artists to pray on the naive and week. While going through my countless news feeds I discovered a story published by the Leader Post about a women that discovered a scam that prays on one's love for puppies. According to the story the women was interested in by a dog and though she had found a breeder online with the dog and price she was looking for. Now luckily in this cases the women was smart enough to do some background checking on the breeder to find out the address given to her was a fake and the information though appearing legitimate did not jive considering this breeder was willing to flight the puppy to her in -50C temperature. This story is a good example of how people should act online when purchasing anything.
When purchasing anything online people should do what they do in real life, use common sense. In real life you always make decisions about the places you shop. You look at the store and judge them by appearance. You ask friends what experiences they had there. You find out what type of shopper insurance they offer, things like return policy, price guarantee, warranties, etc. So why would you not do that online?
When shopping online research, Google is not their to just find funny pictures it is there for research. before shopping at a site find reviews of the site. If you can not find any well then that is a good indication it might be a place to avoid. Also read multiple reviews both good and bad because often just reading one review will not give you the true picture as reviewer tend to be over dramatic about something and either give a site a really high review or really low review and neither are really warranted. Also read reviews from independent site not the reviews on the site itself as though reviews are easily faked or moderated.
Other thing you can do to protect yourself is check scam warning sights like www.phonebusters.com. You can also use third party trusted purchasers like Paypal or Google Checkout as these sight pay for the products for you and you pay them. This gives you a layer between your credit card and the merchant. Most reputable online sites will support these services because they know the value of them their selves.
There are many other things that a person can do to protect themselves when shopping online but the best advice is do do exactly what this women did and research and use common sense. As the saying goes, "if it is to good to be true, it probably is."