BOSTON — Prime Day is here. You’ve probably seen the emails. It’s probably on your screen at work. However, whether it’s Amazon, Walmart, or even when you shop small business online, be careful.
As you get your laptops charged and credit cards ready to compete with the other 150 million prime members, realize hackers are also competing to get your money.
“The certain goods and services that we want, you know cameras and microphones and speakers from working from home, it’s a very very perfect time for scammers to take advantage of it,” said Mark Ostrowski who works at Check Point Software in Boston.
He says nationwide, he’s seen newly registered domains containing the words “Amazon” and “Prime” double within the last month. Ostrowski says 20% of those were found to be malicious.
So what do people need to do to protect themselves?
- Watch for misspellings of Amazon.com. Beware of misspellings or sites using a different top-level domain other than Amazon.com. For example, a .co instead of .com.
- Look for the lock. Avoid buying something online using your payment details from a website that does not have secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption installed. An easy way to tell is that an icon of a locked padlock appears, typically to the left of the URL in the address bar or the status bar down below. No lock is a major red flag.
- Share the bare minimum. No online shopping retailer needs your birthday or social security number to do business. The more hackers know, the more they can hijack your identity. Always maintain the discipline of sharing the bare minimum when it comes to your personal information.
- Before Prime Day, create a strong password for Amazon.com. Once a hacker is inside your account, it is game over. Make sure your password for Amazon.com is uncrack-able, well before October 14.
- Don’t go public. If you find yourself at an airport, a hotel or your local coffee shop, please refrain from using their public wi-fi to shop on Amazon Prime Day. Hackers can intercept what you are looking at on the web. This can include emails, payment details, browsing history or passwords.
- Beware of “too good to be true” bargains. This will be tough to do, as Prime Day is filled with great offers. But, if it seems WAY too good to be true, it probably is.
- Stick to credit cards. During Prime Day, it’s best to stick to your credit card. Because debit cards are linked to our bank accounts, we’re at much higher risk if someone is able to hack our information. If a card number gets stolen, credit cards offer more protection and less liability.
Since Amazon has been raking in sales in 2020, there is a big push this year to support smaller businesses instead of the successful retail giants.
“I never got it until I was older, about how important local business is to keep your town alive and like to keep the community healthy to keep your school district healthy, to keep your fire department and just your library,” said Tim Masters, owner of My Green Mattress. “Everything going, it all comes back to local business. Those local sales help support local families. The tax dollars that they bring in goes to keep everything going in the community.”
It’s not just Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday is going to look different this year too. As you are working from home and shopping from home this holiday season, make sure you do it safely.
“Small businesses, other large retailers, they’re all subject to this the same sort of attack of creating these fake sites and trying to scam consumers,” said Ostrowski. “It can be done via email. It can be done obviously by somebody forwarding a coupon from a friend of a friend to a friend and someone clicking on that and all these methods are just ways to get consumers to get to these phishing sites.”
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