Quote:Black Friday is a great opportunity for scammers to line their pockets — but not with your money if you follow our advice.



In the run-up to any holiday season, scammers get busy. A lot of the time, their actions are rather primitive. Getting ready for Christmas? Expect to be bombarded with fake discounts. Valentine’s Day round the corner? Watch out for fake gifts. Big soccer tournament coming up? There’ll be no shortage of fake tickets.

But the greatest amount of fake stuff appears the week before Black Friday, the day after US Thanksgiving that marks the start of the Christmas period, which is a global sales bonanza for retailers peddling anything from soap to smart TVs — and for scammers too. Today, in the countdown to Black Friday, we look at the latest cybercriminal tricks and ways to counter them.

Discounts! Discounts? Discounts…

Every year in late November, this word experiences a popularity spike. And the craze for low prices plays right into the hands of scammers, whose emails, coupons and phishing links merge with the mass of genuine offers.

Let’s look at an example: Walmart — the world’s largest wholesale and retail chain — appears to be offering customers a $750 gift card:

Follow just four simple steps to (not) get a gift card

It’s pretty easy to spot the scam here:

• For a start, $750 is a tidy sum. Ever seen a store offering that much before?
  
• To claim your card, you first have to enter your email address and “Basic Info”. It’s effectively the legal purchase of personal data — but at an astronomical price. Would Walmart really be doing that? Hardly.
  
• And what’s this third point about completing the recommended deal? To get a gift card, you also have to pay? That’s an obvious red flag. You’re definitely dealing with scammers.
  

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