Buyers Beware
A public service announcement to those in the community. I have recently noticed a massive spike in Bot activity from countries with notoriously nefarious actors. Speaking with other retailers, this is very common and sites get scraped and spoofed. It has happened to me and others that I know.
The point here is if you see a product for sale that is new and is publicly being advertised at a massive discount at a retailer you haven't heard of before...it's probably fraud. This is common in the holidays for these bad actors trying to capitalize on a surge in sales.
If you go to a website and it looks like the retailer you are going to but suddenly pricing looks crazy, check the URL. Usually it is a minor misspelling or use of a greek letter (alpha in place of a) so that it is less visually obvious.
Credit cards and PayPal help but be vigilant.
@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.
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verdantaudioI hope it helps some people understand what goes on when you use your email addy and address or even your phone number on line. To explain how even an oven knows what you are cooking I will explain. I have one of those food Services that mail you meals for the week.They sell and I think now they even give you the small oven to cook the meals in. Part of the oven set up is to connect it to your home Wi-Fi network. I can only assume that when you insert your meal and scan the barcode of the dinner your cooking which sets time and temp...That is fires off a signal to the company to let them know what meal your cooking to see what the favorites are. That my Friends is Marketing. No one to call and ask your favorite meal or send you a email survey. Just watch what there eating.
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