Avoid Getting Ripped Off While Cyber Shopping
More than 75% of consumers are expected to be comparison shopping and buying online this holiday season, which makes them ready marks for a litany of new cyber shopping scams.
These scams come in wide variety--from bogus price-cutting and comparison sites to cut-rate retailers that never deliver the goods.
The Better Business Bureau in St. Louis, for example, warns about Chinese sites offering wholesale electronics, including iPhones and Sony PlayStations. Consumers who have ordered these goods report that they got package tracking numbers before they wired money, but their boxes turned up empty.
The Texas Attorney General, meanwhile, charged a litany of bargain-shopping sites for purporting to offer unbiased price-comparisons, while they secretly collected payments for luring consumers to substandard sites.
Experts say there are a few warnings that could tip you off to the scams.
Mystery merchants: Bogus price-comparison sites often list only a handful of unfamiliar merchants. If the site doesn't have a single mention of some of the big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy or wholesalers, such as Dell and Hewlett Packard, you can consider it a red flag, according to the Texas attorneys.
Below rock-bottom prices: There are definitely plenty of deals available this holiday season, particularly on big-ticket items such as televisions, computers and cameras, but if a mystery merchant is offering prices far lower what you could find at Costco or Best Buy, you've got to ask why. Web complaints indicate that the low price was sometimes possible because the product came without key component parts--cameras without lenses and batteries, for example--that needed to be bought separately. In other cases, as with the Chinese retailers, the products were cheap because they weren't going to be delivered.
Super-stars with freckled histories: Many bogus web sites offered "five-star" rankings to merchants that turned out to have long histories of ripping off consumers, according to the attorneys investigating the Texas price-comparison sites. If you are tempted to buy from an unknown merchant, make sure you know how they got their stars, suggested Laura Conrad, president of Los Angeles-based PriceGrabber.com. At PriceGrabber, the ratings are based on customer reviews that you can read on the site. You can also see how many customers reviewed the retailer, so you can have some level of comfort that retailers with thousands of high ratings are probably pretty good.
PriceGrabber also provides other information, such as how long the retailer has been an authorized merchant. Make sure you check, Conrad suggested. If the merchant has bad reviews, read them to see what others are complaining about.
If you're at a site that doesn't explain their ratings, Google the merchant to see if there are any complaints lodged online. If you're buying big-ticket items, it also may be worth your while to check their reputation with the Better Business Bureau.
Missing terms & conditions: Most legitimate sites explain the terms with which you do business, from how much of your personal information they catch with "cookies" to how soon you can expect to have products shipped. Make sure you look for these terms. Consider it a warning if they're nowhere to be found or if the site includes misspellings and other signs of being unprofessional. Scam sites are put up--and taken down--rapidly, said Alison Southwick, spokeswoman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus in Arlington, Va. When you're running from the law, you might not take the time to spell-check your copy.
Also be sure to click on "product details" before ordering. In some cases, the product photo and the listing of what's in the box don't match. This simple check would have told you about missing parts.
Payment method: Real retailers accept credit cards, which provide you with consumer protections, such as the right to dispute a charge if ordered goods don't show up or show up damaged. If a retailer demands that you pay with a wire transfer, walk away.
Check reliability: The Better Business Bureau provides reliability reports for many retailers that you can access here. Additionally, if the web site says it's approved by Verisign or TRUSTe, click on that symbol. It should go through to the company that offers the security seal. If it doesn't, you're playing with fire--or, rather, fraud.
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