<div class="block">With the Holiday season approaching, consumers should be on alert for scams. Kevin Gosschalk, founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, joined &#39;Stretching Your Dollar&#39; to talk about warning signs when it comes to credit card and sensitive information theft. He even revealed how scammers are taking advantage of consumers through their streaming apps.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Avoid Scams During the Holidays

Yeah, I know. Hi, everyone and welcome to stretching your dollar. I'm Christian Shower here at the New York Stock Exchange. Well, during this half hour, we're going to give you everyday tips to make the most of your money will cover important topics like how to negotiate better, how to manage your money and how to say for the things that you want. So each day I share my expertise from Wall Street and I'm joined by experts to find out how we can stretch our dollar. And on today's show, most Americans are having issues boosting their emergency savings. So we'll have a brand new study out from our friends. Been great to discuss more. Plus the consumer news, you need to know like new home sales data out today and while the global demand for oil and gas might peak by 2030 but first, the holidays are fast approaching and whether you're hitting the road or staying close to home scammers, think it's the most wonderful time of the year to take advantage of you in your wallet. Kevin go the founder and CEO of our labs joins me now to help us figure out how to protect ourselves this season and beyond. Thank you so much for joining. Of course, the holidays almost approaching. Why do we see such an increased amount of scams during this time? Hi, Kristen. It's, it's a good question. So the reason for that is it's also the busiest time of the year for the merchants, for the ecommerce platforms, the online retailers, the physical retailers and they don't want their customers to get disrupted during this very busy peak season of shopping. So they tend to relax some of the controls and checks and balances that they have in place typically throughout the rest of the year to make sure that due to an increase in transactions, they're not flagging too many transactions suspiciously. Unfortunately, of course, criminals are also aware of this kind of process and they use that to kind of hide the kind of nefarious ways of making money during the season. Well, we know that credit card scams, they are big business for criminals, Kevin as you outline there, but they often start as small charges for the consumer, something that might not be easily identified. Explain what some of the methods are. Yeah, so what the Attackers do in this scenario is they're trying to test credit card information to see if it's valid and they don't wanna flag any of the fraud checks on your card. So they make very small transactions. They might go to a donation website, make a dollar transaction or something to that effect where it's a very small micro payment and effectively, they're just looking to see if it goes through. If it goes through, then they'll take that card somewhere else to commit a larger crime with it and get a larger transaction. So what you should look for in this scenario is of course, if you're seeing small transactions that look unusual, uh what we would recommend is you enable push notification with your credit card issuer. Most banks now have the ability for you to get a notification when you receive uh a payment or make a payment. As you're seeing that you can go into the app and dispute that payment, but more importantly, block the card because most likely criminal has access to your information. Unfortunately, at that point. Well, like credit cards, I know the number of gift card scams also rises during the holiday. How can we avoid being taken advantage of for some of our gift cards? Yeah, that's a good question. So we at our case, our threat researchers see a very large increase in gift card fraud during um the holiday season, especially around things like Thanksgiving. Um you know, the Black Friday and then obviously going into Christmas. The reason for that is it's a great gift. It's an easy gift to purchase for somebody. What fraudsters are looking to do is the moment you purchase the card. But before the recipient activates the card, that card is now active and can be theoretically used even if you don't have the physical card, as long as you can figure out the combination on the back of the card. So what they're doing is they're basically brute forcing and guessing these card combinations to figure out, can I find a valid card? And what you might find is when you go to use the card, it's already all been spent or it's being partially redeemed, some of the money is missing in those scenarios. What you want to do is reach out to the issuer of the card or the merchant that you maybe have purchased the card from and let them know that there's been a suspicious usage of that card and they should be able to reimburse you for that. I know most of us subscribe to at least one streaming service and they certainly can be popular around the holidays too with all those Christmas movies. But now scammers have figured out how to take advantage of people that way to break that one down for us. Kevin. Yeah. So the stream business is obviously highly lucrative. Um and can be expensive in some countries and some regions. So what fraudsters have found is they can actually steal your account and sell it to somebody else and they will log in and watch streaming services using your account. Um And they're actually explicitly told not to change information on the account, not to create new profiles. So you shouldn't see anything like that in your account. But what you might start seeing is movie recommendations or recently watched movies that you don't recall watching. If you see activities like that in your account, you want to go change the password to make sure that they no longer have access to your account information. And ideally if possible enable things like multi factor authentication and other stronger forms of protection. OK. Good to know. So we've talked obviously about the emergence and popularity of artificial intelligence a lot. At least on this show this year, there are good and bad use cases. But how are scammers tapping into this new technology to access our personal information? That's a great question. So, generative A I where it's creating content is really fantastic at making messages look very authentic, very real. Unfortunately, scammers also have access to the same technology and what we've started seeing is they're using it to create scams, things like phishing emails, they'll look more, you know, perfectly worded. You won't see the grammar mistakes that we're used to looking for when it comes to phishing emails. Uh you might get text messages where it'll actually seem more authentic, more legitimate. So we need to start looking at other ways of identifying scams. Ie the attacker is trying to steal information from me or they're trying to get me to do some kind of financial transaction. We need to really be thinking about the actions because no longer can we kind of look at the content and be like, hey, this is clearly a poorly worded email. It's obviously a scam. That kind of uh visibility is going away just because they have access to tools to kind of let them craft kind of perfectly worded messages. We also see it in romance scams. So if you're messaging or using dating apps, you may actually be talking to a bot that's creating perfectly crafted responses based on what you're telling it. We've actually started seeing that. Now that is a little bit freaky. So be careful there. Of course, no one wants to fall victim to one of these scams, but it can happen to the best of us, Kevin. And so if you do find yourself a victim of one of these scams, what should you do? It's a great question. So there's a few steps you should take firstly collect as much information about what happened. So phone numbers, email addresses, anything associated with the scam, the timelines, the dates, what you told them, what they told you gather all that information. If you've lost any money, uh possessions or stolen information, you should call your local police department and inform them as well. They can help if information was stolen, such as social security numbers, credit card, information, bank details and the like you can go to identity theft dot gov and they have specific steps you can take to help protect yourself depending on what information was compromised. And of course, lastly you can uh, activate a fraud alert on your credit report to make sure they're also looking to identify any unusual suspicious things that might be occurring with your information that's been stolen. Alright, Kevin, a great informative segment, especially heading into the holidays. That's Kevin Gosschalk of Arcos Labs.