Holidays shopping brings out the scammers. Here's how to stay safe
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Recently, Peter O'Dowd got this voicemail. Hey, this is Amelia from Walmart. A pre-authorized purchase of PlayStation 5 with special edition and Pulse 3D headset is being ordered from your Walmart account for an amount of $919.45.

Peter is our colleague, an editor at NPR's Here and Now. He did not order a PlayStation. He does not have a Walmart account. And he rightly guessed that Amelia was AI. The call was a scam. Had he returned the call, he might have heard something like this. Oh,

You did not order. Oh, OK. Can you please give us your credit card details so that we can cancel your order? And then they take it from there and they try to get as much personal as financial information as possible from you. As CEO of ScamAdvisor.com and managing director of the Global Scam Office.

George Abraham tracks attempts to separate you from your money and your personal information. It doesn't matter what your education level or how old you are. There's always one moment in your life that a scammer finds you at the right time with the right message to scam you.

For Kelly Richmond Pope, that one moment was a few years ago when Bruno Mars was appearing in her city. So she went to the Ticketmaster website and she managed to get fantastic seats cheap. So my cousin and I go to the Bruno Mars concert. We're super excited. We get in, go through the United Center door and we get a big X over the ticket.

You guessed it, the tickets were fake. And when I go back and I think what happened, the website that I got it off of, it did look a little bit different than the traditional looking Ticketmaster website. It's almost like...

If you got Taylor Swift or Beyonce tickets, front row for $100 a piece. And that was how good of a deal this was. Okay, if you think you would never fall for that, take Kelly Richmond Pope's story as a cautionary tale. She is a professor of forensic accounting. And my area of expertise is fraud, forensic accounting, and white-collar crime. ♪

Consider this. If even people who study scams for a living are not immune to getting scammed, what chance do the rest of us stand? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

Thank you.

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It's Consider This from NPR. There are just a handful of shopping days left until Christmas, and millions of us are getting online, pulling out our credit cards, and clicking buy.

The National Retail Federation predicts holiday sales could be up by 2.5% to 3.5% from last year. Unfortunately, with all this seasonal shopping comes more opportunity for financial and identity theft. Kelly Richmond Pope, as you heard, is professor of forensic accounting at DePaul University in Chicago. I talked to her earlier this month about ways to protect yourself from online fraud as you do your holiday shopping.

Start with the why. Why do we see scams rise around the holidays? Is that just simple math? More purchases means more scamming opportunities? Absolutely. I mean, we see an increased amount of spending, and that really is the driving force behind why we see more scams during the holiday season. And who is being scammed? Who's most vulnerable? So here's the thing. Everybody. Whether it's teenagers, whether it's young adults, the elderly, everyone is vulnerable because...

We are such in the holiday spirit. We're more trusting and we are just buying, buying, buying. There are these websites that just sort of reach out to us and speak to us. We want to help charities. So we are just in this giving season. So all of those things really fuel the scam industry, if you will.

What about I repeatedly in the last month kept getting texts from quote unquote Amazon and not to rip on Amazon, but kept telling me, hey, we tried to deliver your package. We couldn't. And I'm thinking, I don't remember ordering from Amazon, but I or who knows. So like the instinct is, let me click on it and make sure I get my package.

I tell you what I do is I try to keep a list of everything that I've purchased in a certain week or a certain time period. So I make the purchase and then I pay attention to when should the package come. So I just try to keep a mental log, maybe just a little Excel spreadsheet, maybe even use the Notes app in your phone so you can keep track of those purchases. Because what that scammer is hoping that you do is forget.

and second guess yourself. And so I try not to let that happen to myself by just really being diligent about the notes I take so that when I get something from West Elm that says, hey, we tried to deliver something, my first instinct is to say, well, I didn't order anything from West Elm. Another thing to watch for, fake websites. Websites that look really close to the website you were trying to get onto and buy something but aren't quite right.

And this is the thing. There are some really good fake websites now, but you have to pay attention. Pay attention to the tone of the website. Pay attention even to the website address because sometimes there's one character that's slightly different that would let you know that it's a fraudulent website. So if I were wanting to make a donation, I would say,

I would do some research on the charity to make sure it is a legitimate charity before you give any information, especially any personal identification information like your credit card, your address, your social security number. If they're asking for some of those things, be very, very vigilant and go to the actual website. If there's a phone number, call it because the last thing you ever want is for someone to steal your identity.

Any other top tips for us to keep top of mind as we navigate holiday shopping season? Just slow down because one of the things that scammers really prey on is urgency. So they think, hey, you need to act fast or you're going to miss out on this deal. You're probably not going to miss out. Read the fine print. Make sure the website is right. Pay attention to the tone. Pay attention to who sent the message to you because a lot of times people

The red flags are staring us right in the face, but our hurry just makes us overlook things that are just staring at us. So just slow down. I guess another top tip would be get off your sofa, get off your computer and just walk into the dang store. It makes it a lot harder to...

to be the victim of online fraud. It does. Just take five seconds. Take a deep breath. Read it a little bit closer before you click. If it seems suspicious, it probably is. Don't click. Professor Kelly Richmond Pope is author of Fool Me Once, Scam Stories and Secrets from the Trillion Dollar Fraud Industry. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. And happy shopping.

This episode was produced by Connor Donovan, Thomas Donnellian, and Claire Marie Schneider. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and John Ketchum. Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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