As the festive season has arrived, e-commerce portals in India like Flipkart, Amazon India and others have started offering discounts, cashback and several other offers to lure buyers. Festive offers from shopping sites usually comes during Diwali, so this is the most awaited time for shoppers in the country. People tend to easily get carried away seeing handsome discounts and cashback offers.
During the festive season, most of the buyers make an online payment and this is where scammers come in the picture and dub gullible citizens. Online shopping and digital payments are still somehow a new concept in the country, especially in small cities, people easily fall for scams. Several people have complained about online fraud during e-shopping. So, when it comes to online shopping, there are seven tips to protect your money from scammers during the festival season.
Customer care call
Fraudster call users and to draw attention, they represent themselves as the bank's representative. They offer a new card or credit limit extension or claim that your card has blocked and then offer ‘help’ to unlock it.
SMS or Emails offering attractive deals
Spammers send emails or messages to people around a festive season to lure them with attractive deals. However, these are too high to be believed that most of them are either fake or some times can even be a phishing attempt. It is advised to always visit the official e-commerce website yourself instead of directly clicking the link that is there on the email.
Common Coupon Scam
To get a massive discount, people google to search for coupon codes on while shopping online. However, these coupons are fake and are made to lure people to click on links meant for phishing.
Fraud E-shopping site
One needs to be very careful while opening e-commerce websites and be sure to check the URL and sites name. During the sale season, several fake websites of e-commerce platform pop-up in different URLs to steal login details Eg: Filpkart or Flipcart instead of Flipkart, or something similar.
Do NOT use public computers for online banking:
You should strictly avoid conducting transactions through online banking on public computers like a cyber cafe. Even if you make sure no one sees your screen and log out carefully, the fraudster can hack your account anyway and find ways to record your activity.
Fake WhatsApp messages
WhatsApp is where most fake news or offers are sent. There are several WhatsApp group that talks about discounts on products of popular brands but we advise you to not to believe it blindly. Some phishing attempts even try to steal online banking credentials.
Feedback calls
This is new trick of scammers to loot peoples' hard earned money. One receive a call from a so-called executive to get your feedback on a certain purchase you made online after the delivery has been completed. After the so-called feedback round, the executive says that you have won “Rs 15 lakhs or an XUV 500 car” as part of a lucky draw associated with the purchase of the product. The scam is that the executive will ask you to send a “registration fee” to process the gift.
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