Avoiding Holiday Scams: How to Help Protect Your Finances This Season

The holidays are a time for fun, family, festivity, and … fraud? Unfortunately, this is true. Learn how to protect your finances against the cybercriminals, scammers, and scurrilous Scrooges looking to defraud you and ruin your festive season.

Why Are Scams a Big Problem Around the Holidays?

It’s sad that, at a time of year supposed to be about joy, peace, family, and camaraderie, incidents of scams and fraud increase. Financial criminals don’t take the holidays off, so while you're enjoying eggnog, purchasing presents, or donating to charities, scammers are saying “Bah humbug!” 

As fiendish as their actions are, the correlation makes sense. November and December are huge consumer spending months as people buy gifts for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanza — or simply treat themselves to Black Friday deals — and all this money attracts malicious actors.

For the 2022 holiday shopping season, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center received reports from nearly 12,000 victims, resulting in losses totaling more than $73 million. How can you make sure you won’t be part of this season’s fraud statistics?

Common Holiday Scams

Knowing what these tricks and lies look like can help you protect yourself. Here are some popular festive season scams:

Charity Scams

We’ll begin with perhaps the most reprehensible of all scams: fraudsters posing as charities. These criminals set up fake organizations and keep all the donations for themselves.

Only donating to well-known charities — and ensuring any link you click actually goes to their official website — will help you avoid these scammers. However, many lesser-known charities are still deserving of support. If you wish to contribute to one of these, ensure you do your research.

Investment Scams

Beware of anyone urging you to invest your money unsolicited. Criminals especially like cryptocurrencies because they’re just about impossible to trace.

Phishing E-mails

Emails with fake links are a classic and ever-popular form of fraud. Carefully check the email address from any deal that seems too good to be true. Also, be wary of any email from a sender posing as your bank, or any service to which you subscribe, asking you to “verify” information.

Social Media Scams

Scammers use social media sites to offer holiday promotions and gift cards for completing surveys designed to steal your information. Never enter important banking or personal information on surveys.

There are also lots of fake and misleading products on social media. AARP research found nearly half (44%) of U.S. adults bought something via an ad they saw on social media in 2023, up 6% from the previous year. And 35% reported being the victim of fraud from such a purchase.

Stay Safe With Vectra

Staying vigilant and taking a second to think before clicking on social media ads, email links, or on the “purchase” button can save you a lot of money and headaches. But don’t stress too much; Vectra has got your back. We have anti-fraud measures to help keep your finances safe. 

If you suspect a scam has affected your Vectra account, please notify us right away. To learn more about how we deal with fraud, please contact a Vectra Bank professional today and we can help!