Safe Internet Alliance

Though some Americans have had their Christmas shopping done for weeks, if not months, there are still plenty more who have once again waited until the last minute to amass their gifts. With online sales increasing every year, many are bypassing the holiday crowds and lines in favor of e-commerce websites, and they're searching for the ones with the best deals. This is just what cyber criminals are counting on. The Today Show reports on the ease of creating a scam e-commerce website and taking a hot commodity like the i-Phone and offering up a price too hard to resist. "I purchased a website, which cost me a couple bucks," said Jim Stickley, from Trace Security, who created a fake e-commerce website to demonstrate. "I put it up, and that was it. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to buy. I collected the person's name, the person's address, their home phone number, their credit card number, expiration date, everything we need to know to access their credit card." Most consumers don't realize they've been scammed until they don't receive the item they ordered. "The best thing you can do if you're going to a website you've never heard of, take the domain name. Go to Google, put it in the search engine and see what comes up. If there's nothing that comes up about it, that's a bad sign. On the other hand, if there is lots of stuff, news articles and blog posts, then that at least lets you know that the site is legitimate and has been around." This comes not long after Senator Rockefeller released the results of an investigative report into "Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers." Unlike the scam website set up by Stickley, some of the tactics detailed in this report are technically legal:

The research examines "controversial e-commerce business practices that have generated high volumes of consumer complaints" and focused on sales tactics that "charge millions of American consumers for services the consumers do not want and do not understand they have purchased," according to the Staff Report ... ... The report reveals that numerous well-known e-commerce companies have earned millions of dollars through post-transaction marketing "scams", including sellers such as 1800Flowers.com [http://ww11.1800flowers.com/] , Fandango , FTD , Orbitz , Priceline , Shutterfly , Buy.com , Barnes & Noble , Expedia , as well as many, many more.

Of course, as Stickley pointed out in the Today Show segment, if an e-commerce deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Consumers should be wary when they're shopping online, even when it's on a well-known site. Even the most legitimate online destinations may be counting on you not reading the fine print.