The Federal Bureau of Investigation is warning shoppers of online scams swirling this holiday season.
There's at least two scams circulating FBI agents are aware of and are expecting more scams to spike this month.
"With the great volume of online commerce we see over the holiday season, of course those numbers ultimately go up," said Robert Tripp, FBI San Francisco's special agent in charge.
One scam is a shopper purchases an item online, but the product never arrives. The same scam also surfaces when someone sells something online and the buyer never pays. Bay Area consumers lost $8 million in those scams last year, with residents in the South Bay filing the most complaints and lost the most money locally.
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"If an offer seems too good to be true, if a vendor is offering a very high-end item at a low cost, consumers should really do their homework and determine if that online vendor is actually a real legitimate vendor," Tripp said.
Another hot scam this year is what the FBI calls "pig butchering." The scam involves being contacted through social media, urging the potential victim to invest in cryptocurrency which is largely untraceable. Once a relationship is formed and money is transferred, they vanish.
"They'll induce the victim to invest large sums of money and then at some point the scammer, having fattened up the victim hence the term 'pig butchering,' the scammer will disappear with all of the victim's money," Tripp said.
The FBI is urging everyone to be vigilant and offering a few tips to protect consumers:
- Use strong passwords online
- Set up two-factor authentication
- Do not click on unknown links
Experts also said to be skeptical of unknown charities asking for money.
"We ask the consumer to be mindful as you're looking through your e-mails and not to click on any e-mails that might be questionable," said Joe Oregon, a cybersecurity chief with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Anyone who falls victim to a scam should contact their bank right away and report it on the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center's website.
