Prioritize Cybersafety While Shopping This Cyber Monday!

Shop until you drop fighting the crowds this Black Friday? Or shop safely online from the comfort of your couch and have everything delivered to your doorstep this Cyber Monday?

You choose! But if you are planning to spend some time shopping from the comfort of your couch, make sure you’re caught up on the important cybersafety tips to make that an enjoyable experience.

A Little History

Cyber Monday is part of a two day marketing scheme full of shopping discounts and sales following American Thanksgiving. Each year people flock to the box stores and malls on Black Friday to find the best deals they can. On Cyber Monday, they turn on their computers and begin all over again looking for the best savings online. The e-commerce term “Cyber Monday” was first coined back in 2005 by the U.S.’s National Retail Federation and since then it has become one of the biggest online shopping days of the year in many countries, including Canada. According to NBC News, in 2020 Cyber Monday became the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history with sales reaching almost $11 billion. With staggering amounts of financial and personal information moving around the internet on Cyber Monday, it’s more important than ever to protect yourself from those who might try to take advantage of that.

5 Tips For Online Shopping Safety

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 5 ways YOU can stay safe during Cyber Monday and anytime you shop online!

1. Check The Source ⬇️

The first thing to do when you are shopping online this Cyber Monday or anytime is to make sure you trust the sources and websites you are purchasing from. It’s easy to trust websites associated with popular brands and brick-and-mortar stores or well-known online retailers like Amazon, but it’s important to do the research when looking into buying from lesser known online businesses.

When you’re on a site, check for the padlock symbol to the left of the URL in the search bar. This symbol signals that your connection while browsing is secure. Those websites are using the HTTPS protocol to encrypt the data being sent between the web server and your computer, so others can’t read it. You can learn more about that and other cybersafety facts by taking KnowledgeFlow’s FREE Cybersafety for Everyone course on cybersafetyacademy.org.

Another good practice is to bookmark sites you regularly shop from to avoid typosquatting scams, where fraudsters register a URL that is a slight variation of a legitimate website’s domain name in order to deceive users. Be careful when doing a Google search for a store’s website because malicious ads will sometimes appear before a legitimate website in your search. This is one good reason to use an ad-blocker and you can learn about how to do that here.

2. Use A Secure Wi-fi Connection 🛡️

One of the simplest ways to stay safe while online shopping is to use a secure wi-fi connection. This means that you should never do your online shopping or anything that requires inputting sensitive information into a site while being on public wi-fi. If you must browse check out these Public Wi-fi Safety Measures, but wait until you return to the safety of your private home wi-fi connection before making any purchases. Learn about how you can secure your home network here.

3. Avoid Online Fraud ❌

There are many platforms out there selling counterfeit products. To avoid being scammed by these sellers always make sure to read the production description carefully, looking for anything that might identify it as a fake. Some clues you might notice are vague contact details for the company, being asked for more personal information than is necessary, spelling and grammar mistakes, and offers that seem to good to be true. For more information about types of online scams take a look at this tipsheet here.

4. Avoid Phishing Scams 🎣

On a holiday like Cyber Monday, your email will likely be cluttered with marketing ads and newsletters from all sorts of companies who want you to BUY, BUY, BUY. It’s important to learn how to verify whether the email is legitimate or if it’s a spam email that made it through the email platform’s filters. Phishing scams are designed to trick you into revealing personal information or giving away your money, and they often come in the form of an email or ad that looks credible, but isn’t. Learn about what phishing is and how to spot it here. You can also practice spotting these scams by signing up for our Phishing Campaign, which is a teaching course delivered straight to your email!

5. Protect Your Payment Information 💳

A necessary part of online shopping is spending money, but you should be the only one spending it! It’s crucial that you protect your payment information online so that scammers and hackers can’t steal your finances or even your identity. That means you should only give your credit card information to websites you trust. If a website asks to save your credit card information for faster checkout the next time, it’s best to decline and re-enter it if you shop there again, depending on how frequently you use and trust the website. Lastly, you can use a third-party payment processor like PayPal to process your transactions when you are shopping online. By acting as a middleman between your money and the recipient, it offers an additional level of security and buyer protection.

Bonus Tip: Gift Cards 🎁

If you’re ever buying gift cards so that someone else gets a chance to shop, be aware that they are becoming increasingly susceptible to fraud. Check out our Gift Card Safety Tipsheet to avoid any disappoint around purchasing them.

More Resources:

• Scam Red Flags: The Hallmarks Of An Online Scam (knowledgeflow.org)
• Online Shopping Safety: 5 Tips For Shopping Safely Online (knowledgeflow.org)
• How To Be UnHackable: Claudiu’s 10 Rules For Cybersafety (knowledgeflow.org)
• Browser Bookmark: How They Help You Avoid Online Fraud (knowledgeflow.org)

Happy shopping this Cyber Monday!