Financial experts in North Carolina say credit card and online shopping scams are prevalent year-round, and recommend monitoring your bank account transactions as a daily habit in the New Year.
More than 10,000 North Carolinians collectively lost nearly $100 million to scams in 2021.
Daniel Rathfelder, vice president of card services for Coastal Credit Union, explained ATM skimmers loaded onto point-of-sale devices remain of one of the top techniques fraudsters use to steal card information.
“It is a year-round problem. We’re seeing different attacks,” Rathfelder explained. “People are doing card testing to see if they can get authorizations through cards, that happens regularly.”
According to a report released by North Carolina’s Attorney General Josh Stein, there were more than 1,600 complaints filed with the North Carolina Department of Justice last year related to card scams.
People who suspect a scam should call their bank or credit card company and notify them of suspicious charges, and report it to the FBI’s internet crime complaint center at ic3.gov, or call North Carolina’s consumer hotline at 919-716-6000.
Rathfelder emphasized online communication cannot be verified, and recommended rather than using ads or pop-up chats to make purchases or share information, do a Google search to verify a business through a website.
“There’s a lot of texts, online scams, email, direct messages through different applications now; Snapchat, LinkedIn,…
