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However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam.

Let's talk about scams.

It's the must listen show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their loved ones from scams.

Every Tuesday am Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams.

And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to let's talk about scam some Joyce Petrowski, founder and board president of Rose Resources Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly, where we have a scam prevention through education program where we bring scam prevention techniques and give you the tools to be able to recognize scams and avoid falling victim to these scams.

You can find our website at Roseadvocacy dot org, where you'll find all of our social media links.

On the homepage, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and there's two options to sign up for newsletters.

We send one in the mail at the beginning of every month, and we also send one via email, and then every Tuesday morning at nine fifteen in about twelve minutes thirteen minutes, you'll get tip Tuesday email that has a tip on it.

Some people might already know the tip, and that's great, But what it does is it help build a scam prevention through your healthy skepticism and your scam prevention habits.

It helps make it a habit.

The more you see it, the more you keep it top of mind, so that way when you are contacted, you're going to be better app to recognize that it's a scam.

And avoid the avoid engaging with the contact.

Excuse me, this is probably going to be a shorter one than normal.

Today you probably tell losing my voice and hopefully I don't start coughing during this, but we're going to give it a shot.

So today we're going to talk about holiday online shopping scams and charity scams too, scams that happened to really ramp up over the holidays.

As you know, we had Thanksgiving last Thursday, and then Friday was Black Friday, so there's a lot of shopping.

I think it was originally meant people were going in the stores, but a lot of people shop online.

Then Saturday was Small Business Saturday, and yesterday was Cyber Monday, which was meant for all the online shopping.

And today's Giving Tuesday is for all the charities out there.

It's a worldwide platform for people to donate to their favorite charity.

You can find out all of our information on our website if you want to make a donation again Roseadvocacy dot org.

So let's go to the online shopping.

I think today in today's world, a lot of people, for a variety of different reasons, they do a lot of shopping online.

And there are a lot of fake websites out there.

Scammers.

They have thousands of fake websites that they've created.

We've talked before about how much money they're making.

They're taking some of this money and they're reinvesting it.

It's not that expensive to buy a domain, and they don't have to contract out with somebody to build the website because they've already got the technical people they are working for them that can build the website.

And they're going to impersonate a lot of larger companies, and you know, you really have to look at some details and know what to look for to determine, you know, if this is really a fake website.

So we're going to go over a few ways that you can tell, and I'm going to share my screen.

Hold on one second, it's been a while since I've done this.

Here we go, No, that's not it, share screen.

There we go, entire screen, all right, So I am sharing the screen.

So what we're going to do first is I went in and I typed in list of fake online websites for online shopping and Express VPN.

This just happens to be the company that I have a subscription to that I for their VPN services, which is virtual Private network, and they did this article.

Let's see they did it, it says back in twenty twenty three, but it's been updated because they've updated it with list of scam websites in twenty twenty five, so they've gone through.

They kind of give you some what are scam websites?

Right?

They're there for deception and impersonations.

They want to solicit personal information, they want to exploit your finances.

They might put malware on your devices, and they're going to use social engineering tactics, which again is they create that false sense of credibility and they're basically using your good nature against you to deceive you into giving them what they want.

So how do they work those phishing attacks, fake shopping websites, distributing malware, They could have fake profiles on social medias.

They'll even do search engine ads, and they have bots that will flood the comment sections with links to fake sites.

I actually see some of those comments on our mostly on our Facebook is where I see them, and people will put in the comments about well, you know, I was victimized here and I went to this person on this website and they really helped me, and it's a bot doing it and they're just taking you to a fake site.

I tried to delete those as much as I can when I do see them.

So they're going to list here ten different types of scam websites again, phishing websites, fake shopping, malware distribution websites, tech support scams, all different.

We're going to get into charity scams, selling fake tickets, they're going to clone legitimate websites.

And so they actually came up with a list here, and this one basically said, here's a list of the top suspected fake websites to avoid this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But they're still good to look at even though those two days are over with.

And actually I've got emails this morning that some companies have extended their Cyber Monday sales through today.

But these are some ones that they've listed that are fake.

They're malicious sites, and you could go through here and look at all these different ones.

They're going to tell you why they have a low rating, poor customer service, they don't have a lot of contact information, new websites, bargain basement prices that too good to be true.

Thing, here's one impersonating Tiffany.

It's not the official Tiffany and Company websites.

You know, one of the most significant indicators that is a scam is a clear warning from the genuine Tiffany and Company.

The official website explicitly states that their products are exclusively sold through their official country specific platforms and they only work with reputable platforms like farfetch and netaporter as outside sellers.

They don't have functioning social media links, suspicious payment processing.

It's a very young domain.

It's only been around for a couple of years.

Some of these I've never heard of before.

But there are so many different If you just go to do like a Google search for a specific product, there are so many different online shopping sites that come up, and you know they might actually have a legitimate picture of from the legitimate website, because sometimes those are easy enough to copy and then paste on.

The fake website.

Here's one myfaceboxer dot com, and I'm sure there is a legitimate websites that sells boxers and socks and stuff like that with I've seen a lot of them recently where you can get your like on pajamas, your pets picture and stuff like that.

When scammers see that a website is popular and a lot of people buy from it and they're posting just record profits and sales and stuff like that, well then it's an incentive for them to want to.

Impersonate that site.

So you can go down through a bunch of these.

But what I wanted to do was, so here's bed Bath and Beyond and they have bed Bath Clothes and close as c l o s e versus with store closing right, and I believe now all the stores might actually be closed.

I'm not sure if they actually do anything online with bed Bath and Beyond, but you could put this without the parentheses here.

You could just do bedbath clothes dot com.

And I'm going to search it and I'm going to.

Say, is bed bath close dot com a legitimate website?

And I'm gonna just see what comes up.

Immediately it comes up as a scam website that impersonates bed Bath and Beyond.

So you can do this with any website, but you want to make sure you put is or something in front of it, because if you just go to typebeedbathclothes dot com in your search bar, it's going to if you don't have any antivirus or antimoware on your device, it might actually take you to that website and then you might get some malware or a virus on your device, which again another reason why you should always have a strong antivirus anti malware on all your devices, especially your phone, because.

It is a mobile computer and we do.

A lot of online shopping on our phones.

Not sure if you can use your current subscription, just call the company or log in through their official website into your account and see if you have an extra device that's not being used on there.

So that's one way you could go.

In another way you could do it is.

I got to.

Find the url void and I did a segment on this, probably in the summer sometime, I think, and showing you how to go in and look at things.

So you put the website here, Bedbathclothes dot com scan website and it's gonna come up and it's going to say detection counts.

Six out of forty one places detected had detections.

It's only been around for a year.

Server location is in the Netherlands.

So you come down here and all of these first six here.

Bitdefender is a popular one, have detected that it is, so I'm going to hit that it's a bad site.

So I'm gonna hit view more details.

Stop.

This website is not safe.

It's classified as fishing, contains malware that may harm your computer, pretends to be you know this a variety of different reasons.

It could host an gro scam, it could be pretend to be a financial institution.

They highlighted this one here that it was fishing.

But these are some other things that fake websites could could be doing.

So that was really quick being able to tell on that one.

You can go into these other ones for more detail.

And sometimes you're going to have a lot of a lot of technical details that you really have to understand what it is that they're talking about.

But you could always you could always look it up.

Let's see there are let's.

See this is this is one.

This is an article from Forbes that came up and it was written on June eleventh about do not shop on any in any website that's on this list.

And so they have.

The list of brands being in personated as extensive.

Look at all these Amazon, Costco, Bath and Bodyworks, Nordstrom, Saxo, Fifth Avenue, Low's LL Bean, Tommy Bahama, Rolex Brooks, Running, Birkenstock, Crocs, Sketcher's Total Wine.

All of these are big companies that most of them look to be global companies or at least sell all throughout the United States.

But you can just look at all of these companies and ge appliances, right, I mean trying to look at some other ones that I might be able to Ravensburger, puzzles, nurseries, shoes, golf, just about anything, yoga, beauty products, food, wine, you know, Instahart, a whole Deluthe trading, auto parts, Party, Dollar General, a whole bunch of different ones.

And they actually come down here and they're going to to give you all these different domains.

So like Amazon, and I usually always use Amazon as an example.

Just about everybody has an Amazon account, whether you use it or not.

So scammers know they have a lot more likelihood of getting more people to engage with their contact, whether it's phishing, whether it's or not, email, text message, phone call.

You know, they have a better chance of.

Getting you to here, you go, getting you to.

Engage with their contact because your mind is reading Amazon and you see Amazon here, but you're not necessarily paying attention to the my in the box in this line.

So this my Amazon box news.

What I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna do this, and I'm going to copy it, and I'm going to go back in to a search bar and go is and then you could type it in.

I'm just gonna paste it, but I'm gonna want to get rid of these parentheses.

Here.

A you could say, is it a legitimate or you know, a fake website, a good website, whatever you want to say, or you could actually, you know, type is and then put it in the Miamazon box dot news.

A scam website or a fraud You can add the word scam or fraud to whatever it is you're searching and see what comes up.

So it's like it is not a legitimate website.

It has one of the lowest trust scores.

Okay, Scam Detector.

You can get on there and look at reviews, scam advisors, scam void, Better Business Bureau.

You know, there's a bunch of different things you can look, but you can do that with any of them.

But again, I'm going.

To go into where's it at here this url void and I'm going to put it in here and get rid of these parentheses.

Oops.

And I'm going to scan the website and it's going to come up and say again, six of forty one have detections.

They registered their domain nine months ago.

Nine months ago.

Now I actually before this show put in Amazon dot com and it came up and showed that their domain was registered thirty two years ago.

That sounds more like the accurate Amazon account, not one that was just registered nine months ago.

So you can get in and look at again, all of these have detected.

Let's go into a bitdefender.

You know, stop, this website is not safe there.

It is classified as fishing.

So there's a bunch of different U information you can get.

But see that's the Forbes.

You go down, there's some costco websites, Nordstrom.

These are ones that are already known out there.

Excuse me.

So when you go to do your online shopping, if you know the legitimate website that you want to go to, then go to that legitimate website.

You already know what it is.

But if you're just searching, So if I'm just searching for.

Let's see.

They had Nordstrom, I'm just going to see Nordstrom's store.

Right, that's the co pilot, that's the AI search.

I was actually looking for something that would say sponsored.

On there.

Let's see if this has any sponsor right here.

Okay, bed Bath and Beyond says official site, blah blah blah.

It says sponsored right here, So that means they purchased an ad in order to get this information to show up in the top three of your Google search, because a lot of people are just going to go down through the first maybe three or five options.

So a lot of people just might pick the first option and this very well could be the official site.

But scammers will buy ads on Google as well to get their fake impersonation website to come up in the top three as well.

So you know, let's say something like uh, cyber Monday extended up to seventy percent off.

Okay, well, you don't necessarily need to click on that.

You can scroll down and again copilots search is the AI search, the artificial intelligence.

But you can go down and I was actually looking for right here, it has you know, bed Bath and Beyond dot com, and it's got some locations that are closed.

But now I know that was the official site Bedbath Andbeyond dot com.

So now I can go into the actual website and start searching for it.

Let's go back to let's see here Saxsmith Avenue.

Here's a few Dollar General.

Look at this Dollar General one Dollar General dot com.

But then look at how they added an AI dollar.

They took the L out okay, and I actually read that as Dollar General AI.

See my mind was already thinking Dollar General, and I thought they added an AI at the end.

But really all they took the L off and they put a lowercase I in there instead of the lowercase L.

And see it caught my mind.

I saw Dollar General and then AI.

So your mind can play tricks on you.

So you can write down all of the characters in that domain and then look at each individual character.

Some people have said they like to write it down backwards and then read the characters backwards, and then they can actually piece together if it makes sense or not.

Some of these I've not heard of.

This is a UK site, This is a German department store.

You know, here's a whole bunch of lows is on here, Tractor Supply, Advanced Autoparts.

There's a whole bunch of fake websites on here.

So you know it might be good for you.

If you're looking to go online shopping this holiday season at a store that you're not familiar with, that you don't know what the legitimate website is you've not shopped on there before.

Type in the name of the store and say legitimate site or type in is and then put the domain the legitimate site or is and then put the domain address a fake site or a scam or if you want a list of known ones, just type in like I did online shopping scam websites for twenty twenty five and that's how I came up with those first two articles.

Another thing you can do is like this article for Forbes.

You can go up here on this toggle switch here and it tells you your connection is secure, and I have it set where I don't want to get notifications from them.

Now I could go on and reset it and say, yes, I want them once I get on their site, I want them to send me notifications, but I don't want to get them.

You can go on and look at cookies and site data.

My third party cookies are blocked.

I have that in my settings for everyone, and then I can manage the on device site data so there's twenty sites that are allowed data from the site that I'm visiting.

This Forbes.

This is also available to the site and its subdomain, so it's email dot Forbes dot com, Forbes dot com, www dot Forbes dot com.

Now you can go in and delete, or you could just hit these three buttons and say don't allow it to save data or delete everything when you close all the windows.

And then a site can also embed content from other sites, for example images, ads, and texts.

These other sites can also save data.

I have no idea what these other sites are.

Data is treated the same as the site you're viewing.

You can go in and you could just say don't allow it to save data.

Then it says that site's not allowed to save data to your and go down through each one.

Wow, that's a lot of them on there.

But then you can also go on to site settings and.

There's five cookies.

I could just hit delete data and it's going to take those five cookies off.

I could go.

In and see anything that is automatic.

So the sound is automatic, and I can change it to block it.

I can change all these are defaults, but you can go in and change these to say allow block.

So there's a bunch of different things you can.

Do with these.

If I get back to this, I wanted to find something about the cookies.

Oh, that's what it was.

I had third party cookies blocks.

So if I go like this, it's saying.

I have ninety days until the cookies are blocked again.

I've temporarily allowed this site to use third party cookies, which means less browsing protection, but the feature are more likely to work as expected.

Well, I don't want to.

Take the risk other people might be at you know, I'm willing to take the risk with Forbes again personal choice.

But that's how you can check out the security of the website as well.

And connection is secure, you can get into that certificate is valid.

You can get in here and you could look at a lot more pieces of information on the certificate.

Ope.

Connection is secure.

Your information, for example, passwords or credit card number is private when it is sent to this site.

You can learn more.

And it'll go in and it'll tell you more about how you can check the site information, how you can check if it's secure.

It'll tell you on your.

Computer, on an Android, on an iPhone or an iPad, So it gives you a lot of information on that.

So that's all I have for the online shopping.

A very good thing to have on all of your devices, as I said before, is antis strong antivirus and anti malware.

You might also want to look at whichever subscription you have or you're looking at getting see if they have endpoint detection and response.

This isn't enhanced, it enhances your antivirus anti malware because this endpoint detection and response is looking at the behavior of a website.

So if it's a brand new malicious website and the threats not known yet, then if it's behaving out of the ordinary, if it's behaving like a malicious site, would this endpoint Detection and Response or EDR is going to recognize it and say, hey, we don't think this is a good site.

It's not behaving like it should and all that, and we suggest you don't go here because it could be a malicious site.

So consider that, and as I said before, and make sure you always have your antivirus anti malware on your phone cell phone as well, because it is a mobile computer.

We do a lot of We do a lot of things on our phone, and we do a lot of online shopping.

On our phone.

That's going to help you not get to these malicious sites as well.

So the second part of what I want to talk about is charity scams, and we talk about this in our presentation.

A lot of scammers come out of the woodwork at the end of the year, especially in December.

They're out today because of Giving Tuesday, but they know a lot of people wait until the end of the year to do their charitable contributions.

Maybe they want to see what their taxes are going to look like for that year, and they work through the stuff with their accountant in December and it shows, well, if you make this much charity, this is going to help you say this much in taxes, or maybe they get their bonus at the end of the year and they use a portion of that to donate.

A lot of different reasons, but anyways, scammers are out.

They're impersonating legitimate charities, and they're also just making up fake charities and they'll go as far as having fake websites and all of that.

So no matter how you get contacted, even if it's from a charity that you are familiar with that you've donated to before, you know how to make that donation.

You know, the charity's legitimate website.

You can find all of their information on their website, how to mail a donation, how to make one on the website via a credit card, their phone number if you wanted to call them and do a donation over the phone.

But let's say it's one you're not familiar with.

So there's a website called chare already navigator at org and I'm going to use Rose as an example, and see it has giving Tuesday match activated.

They're matching donations up to seventy thousand.

I'm going to get out of that.

And we talk about this in our presentation that if you were to type the name of the charity in like you were to type Rose the way we have it listed on everything, Look, nothing's coming up here.

We go, it comes up here, but it's not the same.

Okay, But let's just say I continue and I type the way we have it.

It's going to say no organizations found, and you're going to be like, what.

What's going on?

You know, well, that's because when we applied to the irs, they did not like the periods, all the capital letters, the slash marks, so they took all the punctuation out.

They made rows how you would write the name capital R capital R lowercase ose, just like you would a name.

This is something support these top rated underfunding charities.

You could just explore it if you're interested or not interested.

I don't know how they determine what's charities set are underfunded or not, so I don't have any information on that.

But as we say in our presentations, make sure you have the tax id number for the charity.

If the charity doesn't want to give you the tax id number, then that's a red flag.

If it's a public charity, they should give you the tax id number.

It could be that maybe they have a volunteer calling and the volunteer doesn't know it, but they can get it and they can call you back.

Anyways, I'm going to put mine in so eight seven dash two for seven.

Oh, I don't know if it like the dash or not.

Eight three four nine.

So that's my tax id number.

And see how they spell.

And if you notice, when I first started typing out the rose are period zero period s period, I got as far as rose resources and it came up with this, But again it didn't look the same, so you might be looking and go, well, one of these is probably legitimate, but I don't know which one is legitimate.

But if you put the tax id number in, every charity has their own tax id number.

This is Roses.

So then I click here and that comes up and it gives you all this information profile managed by the nonprofit.

It's a five oh one C three.

This is our physical address, this is our website, this is our phone number, and that we received our IRS designation in twenty twenty one.

It has our mission on here and you can go directly to the website through there.

So there's a lot of good information in Charity Navigator.

You can also market as your favorite.

It looks like I need to go in and put more details in here in order to get rated.

I have it in guide Star, which is candid now, so I need to go in and put some more information.

In here.

But it gives you culture and community is one hundred.

Accountability and finance.

Oh that's why, because they're only looking at nine nineties.

We filed a nine to ninety N the first year, and then the last three years we filed an easy That's weird because because one year of electronically filed IRS form data.

Okay, anyways, I'll go in and put more information.

But here you can see and it tells you if you look under this information for the tax id number.

An ei N is a unique nine digit number that identifies a business for tax purposes.

So always ask for that EI in number.

Use that when you search on Charity Navigator.

Yes, you can search on IRS dot gov.

I'll show you real quick on here.

You have to click through a few more things in the search bar.

You can put in charity search.

Search for tax exempt organizations, tax Exempt organization search.

You can click on either one of them.

Tax Exempt Organization search tool search for a tax exempt organization.

Now you get to this.

You can search all by the employer identification number you put it in.

You can search by name too, but like I said, we highly suggest you do it by the number because it is a unique number for every charity.

And you can search there and then here it comes up and it gives you determinate determination letters the form nine ninety N, which is there copies of returns Publication seventy eight data copies of returns.

My guess is it should have yep, it does.

It has the only one they don't have in there yet is twenty twenty four.

Not sure how long it takes them to get them updated, but we filed ours in May of twenty twenty five and it's still not up there yet, so I'm hoping it gets up there soon.

But you can click into here and you can actually see our return, so you can find out a lot of information.

But as as we talk about in our presentations, you're clicking through a lot more links through the IRS to get where you want to go.

Charity Navigator you can just go directly there and the search button is right at the top.

So anyways, that's all I have for you guys today.

I'm gonna stop sharing.

So just to recap, be very careful when doing your online shopping this year.

If you are familiar with the company, you know their website, go directly there to do even if you see sponsored ads, go directly to the website that you know is the legitimate website and look for the look for the product and the ad, the discount whatever it is, the sale price.

If you're not familiar with the company, do some research.

Just type in the domain is and then put the domain a scam or a legitimate site, or put the name of the company in and say is the name and then put the name of the company a scam and.

Just see what's out there.

And you're, like I said, you're going to come up with some articles that I found the Forbes one and off the top of my head, I can't oh the Express VPN one where they've already gone through and they've given.

You a long list of.

Websites that are being impersonated, and so you can see it's not an all inclusive list.

There are other ones out there, so you just have to be extremely careful with that.

Oh, and have the good antivirus anti malware on all of your devices.

Consider adding endpoint detection and response so it's going to look at new websites the behavior to see if it's acting legitimately or if it's acting more like a scam website.

To protect yourself, always have it on your phone as well because it's a mobile computer and chair.

When you are getting ready to donate to a charity, if you are familiar with a charity, donate like you normally do.

If you're not familiar with a charity, go to charitynavigator dot org, or you could go to IRS dot gov and put in the search bar at the IRS dot gov Charity search and click through those links Charity Navigator right on the homepage.

You just put in the tax id number.

You're going to get directly to that charity through the tax id number because every charity has their own unique tax id number that they were given by the I r S and Charity Navigator gets their information from the IRS.

So it could take a a short amount of time.

With things.

I don't know how Charity Navigator works as far as updating their data if it's on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, but you should be able to get information that you need that it's a valid charity and have the legitimate website to go directly there as well.

So thank you guys for joining us today.

Stay safe out there this holiday season, and don't forget to subscribe you don't want to miss an episode of this.

You can go to our website at Roseadvocacy dot org.

You'll find all our social media links really really really appreciated.

If you would go to our YouTube channel and click subscribe, we are really trying to grow that channel.

That way, you'll get notified whenever there's a new episode.

You can find all the past episodes on there, and you can click on the shorts and that's going to give you anywhere from a thirty to a fifty five second clip of what that episode is about, and just a you know, instead of watching for fifty minutes, you can go look at that and see if maybe you want to go and look at the whole episode.

Anyways, we would love it if you would subscribe to our YouTube channel, and don't forget you're going to want to sign up for our newsletter.

You can sign up for both the one and the mail and the emailed one, or one or the other.

As I said, with the email one, you're going to get an email every Tuesday morning.

If you're already on there, you should have gotten it twenty five minutes ago.

It has a tip Tuesday.

Even if you already know the tip, it is a reminder and it's all there to make scam prevention a habit, not to scare you, not to make you always want to look over your shoulder.

But if you make scam prevention a habit, you are going to be more likely to recognize the scam when you are contacted and then not fall victim and nodding, not engage with the contact and fall and not fall victim to the scam.

So until next week, all right, thank you.

Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode.

Juni in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at KFOURHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge.

So you have the power to make scam protection your healthy habit.

Until then, feel free to reach out to Joyce and let's talk about scams.