Online Holiday Shopping Fraud Risks and What You Can Do to Avoid Them (Infographic) Most Americans worry about online shopping scams, but few take active steps to protect themselves.
By Dan Bova
It's the most wonderful time of the year...to shop from our couches. Online shopping dominated this past Black Friday, and Cyber Monday became the single biggest sales day in U.S. history, pulling in $7.9 billion, according to Adobe Analytics. No question about it: we are addicted to shopping while sitting on our butts. And while most of us are aware of the potential risks of fraud and identity theft, in a survey of online shoppers conducted by CreditWise from Capital One, only 17 percent of Americans took any action to protect themselves.
Jeff Amster, Managing Vice President and Head of Emerging Segments at Capital One, shared more takeaways from the survey (see infographic below), as well as some easy steps we can all take to help keep our identities and credit scores safe.
What is the biggest mistake you see consumers make around the holidays?
One of the easiest mistakes consumers can make is not shopping on secure sites, which are indicated by a URL that begins with "https" or an image of a padlock in the address bar to indicate the site is indeed secure. No matter how good the deal, shopping on unsecure sites isn't worth the risk of exposing your personal information.
What is the best way to protect yourself?
What consumers may not know is that monitoring their credit and keeping tabs on their personal information can be easy with a free app like CreditWise, which automatically sends users alerts from Experian and TransUnion, tracks their social security number and scans the dark web for your information all in one place.
We also recommend making simple changes like signing up for purchase notifications through your bank or credit card company to flag when your card is used to make a purchase and consider changing your passwords to passphrases, which are typically more complex and harder for hackers to crack, while also being easier to remember. For example, instead of using a singular password (i.e. credit), you might use a complete phrase or sentence (i.e. checkyourcreditscore).
Check out these main takeaways from the CreditWise from Capital One survey:
