The holiday shopping season is here and, as recent trends show, more Americans are likely to engage digitally when buying gifts for friends, family and co-workers.
Increasingly, shoppers are skimming through social media sites like Meta Platforms’ (META) – Get Free Report Facebook , Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter to rack up some holiday sales discounts.
While most social media shopping ads are legitimate and do offer good discounts, there are disturbingly increased incidents of bad actors out to scam shoppers who use social media to buy goods and services.
“This time of year has always been the busiest for online shopping, which has grown exponentially during the past decade,” said University of Phoenix cybersecurity expert Stephanie Benoit-Kurtz. “And that was before the coronavirus outbreak caused e-
commerce sales to rocket further. It all adds up to malicious online criminals having many more opportunities to steal valuable personal information.”
This scenario isn’t entirely new, especially with shoppers who browse social media for deals.
About 47% of Americans have already been victimized by social media shopping scams, according to a study by Atlas VPN.
In the study, 37% of surveyed social media users reported being victims of phishing link scams, while the same share of users has also fallen victim to gift card scams. Other non-shopping related grifts include job scams (30%), targeted advertising scams (27%), cloned and hacked account scams (23%), and…
