How to Outsmart Holiday Scammers This Shopping Season

This SecurityScorecard advisory warns of a significant increase in holiday shopping scams — including phishing and smishing delivery notifications, fake retail websites and apps, malicious social media ads, and account takeover attacks — and explains why the season creates a high-risk environment. It provides concise consumer-focused mitigations: use unique passwords and a password manager, enable multi-factor authentication, keep devices updated, avoid public Wi‑Fi for transactions, verify retailer security ratings and charity legitimacy, use a dedicated card for online purchases, slow down before clicking links, and report suspected fraud to authorities.