Eben Brown talks Cyber Monday scams

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to Alabama's Morning News. John Mounts in for JT.
Like Mack and I were talking about at the beginning
of the show, today kicks off in earnest the shopping
season for a lot of you who are going to
work today and spending a little time online browsing, figuring
out what you want to buy. But fake shopping websites
have jumped by two hundred and fifty percent recently. I'm
joined now by Evan Brown, he's live in Miami from

(00:21):
Fox News. Evan, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Good morning.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
These sites they're everywhere and people sometimes have a hard
time discerning but what's real and what's fake?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Right? Yeah, Yeah, that's you know, that's been going on
for quite some time. This increase of two hundred and
fifty percent is really over the past month, and that's
being reported by nord VPN, which is one of the
cybersecurity companies. But what's interesting is that a lot of
these sites are just getting better and harder to spot.
And it happens to the Amazons and the Walmarts and

(00:52):
the ebays, but it also happens to other more specialty
real retailers as well, where the website they used to
like if they were a phony, Yeah, maybe you could
tell a little bit. They just seemed to be formatted
incorrectly and there could have been spelling errors, and the
pictures and graphics were fuzzy, and something just didn't seem right.

(01:14):
They're getting a lot better. In fact, I'm almost ashamed
to say it, but I got duped by one a
few months ago and it looked like the real one.
It really did. And how did I end up there?
Because I googled the retailer name and I clicked on
the very first thing that came up on the Google
search results.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
So those results, you can't always count on them. What
about people who use apps? Because I use Amazon a lot,
but I have the Amazon App, so I don't go
to the Amazon website, but I'm using the app.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
It's a smart thing to do because the apps are
harder to spoof, right, because you already have it on
your device, your phone, your tablet. So if you're using
let's say the Amazon app or the eBay app or
the Walmart app, there's a great level more level of
security there for you and protect. But if you're someone
who's sitting in a computer and using a website, you

(02:04):
have to be more careful. You have to first of all,
look at that ur L make sure it really is
the website you think it is. Again, we keep using
Amazon as the example because it's the biggest. Uh, they're
also the biggest therefore victims of being impersonated. Right, But
if it says Amazon dot com, you're good. If it
says Amazon US store, dot e n slash something else,

(02:27):
dot probably yeah, not really, yeah, dot ru dot NK,
yeah exactly, you know. And that's part of the problem.
So many of these these sites are are originating not
in the US, but uh, you know, in Eastern Europe
or South Asia or Africa, and they just get so
hard to police, and even when you can get them policed,

(02:50):
they pop right back up. It's like playing whack a mole.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
And but in addition to spoofing sites, you also have
tites that maybe are not secure in the way they
handle payment, right like they If you look at r
L and that his http S, it means a secure
If you don't see the S, that means it might
not be secure and your data might be stolen.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, I mean without the S and the HTTP, or
they're not using secure socket level por layer protections, and
that's one thing. The other thing is if they're using
some kind of payment processor that you haven't heard of
at this point, they just want you to enter in
your card number into a text field. I'd be reluctant
to do that. You want them to be using something

(03:30):
like Google pay, Apple pay, or actual credit card processing
paypals another one. I just wouldn't be handing over your
card number to a random text box on a website.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Bottom line, the Grinch is out there everywhere, and so
we have to be careful in the way that we shop.
Evan Brown, thank you so much for joining us, and
I hope you have a wonderful start to the holiday season.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
You too, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Fox News Radios. Evan Brown live from Miami, and I'm
John mount In for JT Traffic and Weather. Coming up
in three minutes. This is Out Obama's morning News