Black Friday has become a phenomenon across the retail spectrum with many people utilising this particular day to unofficially kickstart their shopping for the festive season.
However, Black Friday presents some problems as people are increasingly becoming susceptible to cyber-crimes on this immense consumption day.
For businesses, peak consumption season stretches their capacity, and almost always leads to their websites and mobile apps garnering a lot of traction from customers who prefer to use online platforms in order to avoid the spending buzz that takes over malls during this period.
Hackers are well aware of this, and thus they conduct a lot of data breaches, leaving retail owners and consumers vulnerable.
Those who do their shopping online are at risk the most of being tricked by potential fraudsters, who will be offering fraudulent deals, from their fraudulent companies that will be operating like they are legitimate businesses online.
When hackers access confidential customer information such as banking details, physical addresses and other personal information, they use this to perform other transactions that a customer is not aware of and ultimately cannot trace.
Caution during Black Friday and the holiday season is incredibly important.
With cyber-crimes being on the rise in South Africa, Maeson Maherry, solutions director at LAWtrust, has highlighted these crucial guidelines that can help consumers survive the scourge of cyber-criminality during Black Friday:
* Firstly, always remember that any interaction that comes via email that you did not initiate, needs careful inspection to establish if it is authentic. Attacks like “phishing” will send you an email from an impersonated identity making you an offer that may be too good to be true, this will then get you to follow a link included in the email that will lead to a fraudulent website.
* Always ensure that you really look at the email address to make sure that it is correct. Hackers are smart enough to create fake websites, apps and even companies that bear close resemblance to those that are popular and well known.
* Be sure to look for the indication of a secure website to certify that it is an entity that really exists. You can see that it is a secure website by the first part of the website URL that will be https:// with the “s” standing for secure. You will also see the browser displaying a yellow padlock which shows that the site has been identified by a Certificate Authority that did identity proofing on the company and website.
* To be safer, one should simply type in the URL of an online retailer instead of following prompts and links from emails or search engines. This way you are sure of shopping where you intended to instead of a fake retail site. Researchers say that over 100 000 fake retail sites were detected during the last Black Friday and holiday shopping season.
* Also be careful of downloading apps from websites or from links in emails. Rather look for the app yourself on the relevant app store and make sure that you are getting a shopping app from a legitimate company.
The introduction of online stores and other digital platforms that cater to various consumers has been a great source of convenience in the world of e-commerce, but with great strides in the digital space, the cyber-crimes become more intelligent.
Consumers need to be more vigilant and cyber savvy especially during this period.