Amazon Prime and Scammers want you!

NBC's Rory O'Neill reports that the U.S. is targeted by more scammers then anywhere else in the world!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
At six forty six Columbuses Morning News. It's Mike Elliet.
Glad you're listening this morning. Rooro O'Neil, NBC News Radio.
It is Amazon Prime Day in October and people are
jumping online to get some good deals. But that doesn't
go without a risk, and that means scammers are after
you on this day and then pretty much every day. Rory,
what's the story.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, Prime Days. By the way, today and tomorrow we're
all going to have one little browser window open just
constantly scrolling. Do I need one of those? I don't know.
If eight fucks up, maybe I should. A lot of
that is happening on the job, is my point. But yeah,
at the same time, you know, when you are buying stuff,
especially you know a lot of people have Amazon, they
buy the same stuff pretty routinely. But if it's a

(00:42):
news seller and you don't know and it's a big
item and you want it for Christmas, make sure you
double check as to who the seller is. You know,
Amazon doesn't sell everything that's on their site. There are
a lot of third party vendors in here. Sometimes it's
directly from the maker, but a lot of times it's
a third party and check the review use, make sure
they're credible, make sure they don't have a lot of
complaints against them, or and that they handle returns, because

(01:07):
you can get into a bit of trouble and if
you're holiday shopping, you know, no one wants to go
through those headaches, right.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Shouldn't Amazon vet their third party vendors to make sure
that they're all on the up and up.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
They do, and they do a very good job of it.
But don't be the odd man out right or odd
gal out on some of these things, because it's not
a perfect system, and there are some that are a
little more dodgy than others. And you can file complaints
and you can be made whole, but no one wants
to hassle. Just you know, do the homework, especially on
some of the tech that's coming in from overseas. A

(01:40):
lot of that obviously it's made overseas, but you know,
check where those companies are from, what the other customer
reviews are. You know, if you're buying some laptop computer,
you may find it comes from a third party vendor
who's actually has repurposed a lot of things you think
are new and are actually being sold second and so
just do your homework on some of those higher end items.

(02:03):
If look, if you're buying socks and underwear, not yourself.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
How is it true, Rory, that Americans are targeted more
by cyber criminals than any other country.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, we get about one hundred hits by con people
individually per month. That's about three a day. A lot
of them now coming through your cell phone and those
darn text messages, whether it's about your car's warranty or
you know your card was declined. Submit your credit card
information so you know we'll approve this for you. A

(02:36):
lot of those scams are coming at us in our
inboxes and on our cell phones. But yeah, one hundred
per day, which is more than anyone else on the planet.
So it's tiring to keep your guard up all the time,
but you gotta do it.