Online shopping is steadily increasing and with all that financial information floating around on the Internet it’s no surprise that cybercrime is also on the rise.
Last year, 71 percent of Canadians bought at least one gift online and most cyber shoppers assume their credit card information will be secure during those transactions.
Bridget Murphy thought her account at one of the biggest online retailers was safe until it was hacked four months ago.
Murphy says her Amazon account was compromised and that she is still waiting for the $1500 refund that was promised for the two, Samsung Galaxy phones that were charged to her account.
In the meantime, she paid that amount to American Express and was certain that Amazon would honour its word and keep her account in good standing.
So far, she hasn’t seen any money from the company and says an explanation has not been provided for why it hasn't kept the promises that were made in several emails and phone calls.
“I never envisioned that that would happen. I had every confidence I was going to get the refund back. I was truly flabbergasted and I’ve talked to many people since then and of course, everybody’s quite surprised that a company of this size would not deal with it,” said Murphy.
CTV Calgary Consumer Specialist Lea Williams-Doherty checked into Murphy’s claim and found out that hackers most likely gained access to her account to make the orders using some kind of phishing scam.
Lea talked to a computer security expert who says hackers know people are getting wise to the first generation-phishing attempts, which are the ones that claim to be from your bank.
Experts say scammers are now using emailed advertisements that say ‘click here to unsubscribe’ to catch consumers and that click is all they need to get inside your device.
“You have an advertisement where they’re advertising some vacation destination some place and they’ll say if you do not want to receive this email anymore simply click the unsubscribe button, so you’ll click that button and that actually opens the door for them to hack in and take your password,” said Jon Hodal from Tech Squad.
The best advice to stay away from scams like is to avoid clicking links in an email and to go directly to whatever website you want to interact with and do what you need to do from there.
Lea says consumers should also watch their bank and credit accounts and report any charges they didn’t make as criminals often test charges on smaller items before going big.
Also online shoppers should install software updates regularly as they often contain patches for security holes.
Norton just released a report that found 86 percent of consumers worry they’ll be victimized by online crime and 74 percent believe credit cards are more likely to be stolen online that in person.
(With files from Lea Williams-Doherty)
