Holiday Scams and FinTech Shields: Keeping Your Money Safe This Christmas

The festive season is a time of joy, celebration and indulgence, plus a well-earned period of rest for many – unfortunately though, criminals don’t take time off during the holidays. This is actually one of the busiest times of the year for scammers who take advantage of frenzied retail and payments activity to strike.

With billions more in transactions being executed over this period, it’s easier for holiday scams to hide. You may go through your bank statements after a regular month and spot a suspicious transaction quite easily. However, in December among numerous other transactions for presents, decorations and extra groceries you can be forgiven for losing track! Online scams are particularly prevalent at this time and are able to take advantage when consumers are inundated with festive offers, adverts and marketing campaigns.

The problem, unfortunately, is worsening. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre found that the public lost over £11.5m to online holiday fraud between November and December 2023. This meant that, on average, every victim lost £695. This is more than the year prior, when £10.6m was lost to scams over the same period. And for context, these are only the scams identified and reported…

Criminals’ tactics

It’s important to stay vigilant but here are some of the tactics favoured by scammers in the festive season.

Package delivery scams. This strategy works simply because, with online commerce booming and hundreds of thousands of deliveries being made a day, it’s very easy to lose track of what you’re expecting. Here, scammers will send a text or email claiming your parcel is held up and you need to pay for redelivery, or to click through to a form. The scammer will then either get paid or steal valuable personal information.
Fake holiday deals. As we’ve covered in our blog about Black Friday (hosted by PridePay), many shoppers are determined to find the best deals. Fraudulent adverts and offers can easily sneak in, making it hard to spot what’s true and what isn’t – remember, a bargain is only a bargain if it’s genuine.
Refund scams. Not only is Christmas a prime time for shopping but it’s a high point for refunds, as people either regret spontaneous purchases or gifts are (diplomatically) returned. Again, it can be easy to lose track of what’s what and scammers will take advantage with emails or texts pretending to be from HMRC or well-known stories promising credit or a return. This will take you to a phishing site to extract your valuable personal information.
Charity scams. The holidays can also be a time to help those less fortunate, with charitable giving spiking in this period. Unfortunately, scammers aren’t above using this as a way to access your money and an increasingly popular strategy is phishing under the pretence of a worthy charitable cause.
Ticket scams. A popular gift can be to give someone an experience, in the form of tickets for a show or sporting event. Scammers can take advantage of this, selling tickets which are fake or don’t exist. Once you have made the purchase, either the ticket will not arrive, or you’ll receive a fake ticket.
Fake websites. Scammers are becomingly increasingly brazen and intelligent, with some even creating entire fake shopping websites to take advantage of shoppers’ exhaustion in the run up to Christmas. This can easily happen when chasing down a specific gift for a loved one and take you straight into a replica website created entirely to steal your money (and your valuable personal information).

Keeping your money safe this Christmas

Fortunately, there are several ways to keep safe and protect information when using fintech apps. The Financial Technology Association recently relaunched its annual campaign, Smarter than Scams, for the festive period.

This is a national education programme, in partnership with fintech payment processing giants such as Cash App, PayPal and Venmo, aiming to empower consumers. This is built around three safe online shopping tips:

Protect your personal information by safeguarding login details, using different passwords across accounts, and keeping any sign-in codes or magic links private.
Be aware of account activity by ensuring your account notifications, such as two-factor authentication, biometric payment security and alerts for new device logins, are enabled.
Pause before you pay by only sending money to people you know and trust and verifying and double-checking all recipient information.

In addition, here are some other ways to help protect your money this festive period. It’s worthwhile staying vigilant and exercising caution when shopping as we often shop in the run up to Christmas with time pressures. We want to buy these presents in time for the big day, take advantage of discounts before they expire and in general beat the rush. However, scammers prey on this chaos.

Therefore, it’s important to pause and take time. In particular:

Be sceptical of deals that seem too good to be true, and very short-lasting deals.
Shop with well-known, trusted shopping websites.
Check the website URL (web address) for any mistakes.
If it’s an online store you don’t know or haven’t previously used, check their contact information and returns policy, as legitimate shops don’t hide them.

Hopefully by following these simple steps you can protect your finances, keep criminals at bay and have a great, scam-free Christmas!