LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – As parents and students stock up on school supplies for the upcoming school year, the Better Business Bureau says scammers are targeting those who buy laptops and tablets instead of pencils and notebooks.
“The margins are so tight on pencils that you don’t save a lot of money. But if you have someone looking for a laptop, a tablet, or a piece of technology that requires microchips, there’s a lot of money to be made and, frankly, one more clue wide to work to scam unsuspecting consumers,” said Josh Planos with BBB.
Planos says this time of year, fake websites for stores like Target, Best Buy and Walmart start popping up as social media ads give scammers an entry.
“These are sites that look exactly like reputable resellers, but actually, you know, they’re one letter off, two letters off the domain. And so, they’re just strategies to get access to your personal information and payment. We call those sites lookalike sites. And we’ve never monitored more than we have in the last 12 months,” Planos said.
Planos says these sites can offer discounts that can be hard to pass up. He also says there are details to pay attention to, such as typos, grainy images and website quality.
Ryan Southan of the Nebraska Attorney General’s office says scholarship scams are similar.
“You may be solicited by text, email or social media to apply for scholarships with basically no requirements in terms of qualifications. It’s basically… a scam program, which doesn’t exist, but looks legit, which is money available, but you have to apply fast. Scholarships are limited now. So they use urgency or fear of missing out,” Southan said
Southan says these scholarship scams will likely include an application fee, anywhere from as little as $25 to $100, and could ask for identifying information like your Social Security number.
“I think it’s easy because we’ve gotten used to using our phones and the Internet as the last knowledge. And if it’s printed on the Internet or available on the Internet, it must be true. Fraudsters can pay just as easily as businesses legitimate for search engine optimization and for the scam website results to appear in the search engine results on the first page Most of us do not navigate past the second page and find an attractive title or hyperlink , click on it. And that may be our undoing.” said Southan.
Both Southan and Planos say websites like the Better Business Bureau i Federal Student Aid The website can help you identify if this deal or scholarship is a scam.
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