Buyers Beware

This all Comes from data brokers who are getting your info from Sites that you have done business with before. They sell your info to the data brokers. Then the Data Brokers sell that to any one who wants to compile a list to send out spam and Bots and fraud and other reasons. There are over 600 and some Data Brokers who buy your info.

There is a Service that I use called Incogni. They go to the Data Brokers and request your name be removed. It is the law and they must compli. You can do it yourself but you would need a staff and a 40 hour work week to even scrape the bottom of the barrel to get to them all. They do it all for you as they monitor your name and when it pops up they go after the DB. Do a search and read up on this company. 

I use them and my spam has robo calls have been cut way down. You also get a report of how many were removed and how many are in progres of removal.

Mark R

Best practice: copy the website info and paste into ChatGPT and ask if it’s legit. 

Thanks for this useful information...

I wish to you and to all the best Christmas ever ... And Health....

Almost all of our purchases are now made with Capital One Virtual cards - each vendor gets their own card number and that card number can be used only by that vendor.

@mrkrichman This is outstanding advice as many retailers do share your information and sell lists to 3rd party list brokers and other aggregators.  To be clear though, I am not one of those retailers and will not ever sell anyones information to a third party.  Wise to check a retailers privacy policy though and I applaud you.  Thank you for the tip Incogni.  Legitimate list brokers will follow the law and will reduce the amount of solicitations, both legit and fraud.  

That said, this is not about people actively stealing your info or nefarious actors soliciting from you.  This is about bad people setting up fraudulent storefronts to trick people into buying from them.  They will take your money and never fulfill.  Cause incredible reputational harm to the business that these parasites spoof.  By the time you realize you won't get the product you ordered they have extracted the money from the accounts and offshored it.  

This is a common practice in countries where the governments aren't particularly concerned with people committing overseas fraud.  In fact, some of these governments seem to sponsor this sort of behavior.  

Sad but true discussion.thanks for the info. I know when I stick a cd in the info goes nowhere in line but my phone is in a Faraday bag , yes it's sad.enjoy the music.