Nov. 24—The holiday time has started to bring out Thanksgiving and Christmas cheer, as well as data mining and scammers trying to gather critical information.
Jonathan Rader, owner of Rader Computers, said when it comes to preventing data mining — where companies gain access to phone numbers and email addresses — consumers should simply not make their information available for use.
"Don't give it to untrusted sources," Rader said. "Basically, just be aware of scams. If someone is asking you for personal information, you should just assume they're not who they say they are. You should double check and make sure."
Rader said unless a company experiences a data breach by a hacker, most personal information is gathered through scams directed at the victim. During the holidays, many shoppers may start to save their credit card numbers to certain sites. Rader said since companies can get hacked, though, customers should be wary of saving personal information to a website.
"It's kind of a tradeoff between convenience of having it save your information, versus now that that information is on somebody else's computer, you can't really do anything to protect your information that stays on their servers," Rader said. "The fewer people who have your information, the less vulnerable you are for getting taken."
When it comes to scams, Rader said he has even started to receive scam text messages from people who are posing as United Parcel Service employees. Rader said the messages will often state there is something wrong with a package and UPS needs more information to get the parcel to the correct address.
"The reason they do that is, the way people are buying stuff online, especially this season, it is a pretty safe assumption that most people do have a package coming to them at some point," Rader said. "So if you get an email saying, 'There is a package coming to you,' people will say, 'Oh, I did order something, so that's probably real.' But most of that is a scam."
People do not have control over data breachers, Rader said, but users can be careful about the information they share. If a shopper is not certain whether a company or person is who they claim to be, the customer should not share any information. Finding a safe website can be difficult, unless the company is fairly reputable, such as Amazon.
Rader said shoppers should make sure the name of the alleged company is spelled correctly. If someone misspells a name when searching the site and clicks on one of the first links that pops up, Rader said, they can be subjected to a fake website. People should then close out the website and refrain from giving the website any information.
The website Trustpilot.com also allows for consumers to search businesses and review trust scores to help determine if the business is legitimate.