Most scam advice is a decade old and built around phishing emails. The current wave is more polished: criminal networks register fresh domains in the weeks before Black Friday, buy social-media ads pointing to convincing storefronts, and let the shopping frenzy do the rest. Around Black Friday 2024, reporting surfaced waves of fake sites and ads impersonating IKEA, Wayfair, and The North Face, and researchers documented a network dubbed "BogusBazaar" running tens of thousands of fraudulent shops. The deals aren't real because the stores aren't real.

The 7 red flags

  1. The price undercuts every trusted seller by a mile. A "70% off" flagship phone is not a deal — it is the bait. Fake sites use impossible prices to short-circuit your judgment.
  2. A look-alike domain. Scammers register domains with small twists on real brand names — think misspelled or hyphenated versions of names you trust. If you have to squint, don't buy.
  3. The store only takes wire transfers, gift cards, or crypto. This is the clearest line in the sand: the FTC's guidance is blunt that only scammers ask for gift-card payment, and gift-card fraud ran into the hundreds of millions in reported losses in 2023.
  4. Urgency plus a generic greeting. "Dear Customer — act now to keep your account." Urgent calls to action and impersonal greetings together mark a message as disposable.
  5. Shortened or odd links and unsolicited attachments. A shortened link hides the real destination; an attachment you didn't ask for is a classic payload. Don't click, don't open.
  6. The "package held" text. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has warned about package-tracking text scams; legitimate carriers don't collect redelivery fees by text or ask for full card numbers to fix an address.
  7. An AI-cloned influencer or executive "recommending" the deal. Deepfake videos now circulate on social media driving clicks to counterfeit stores. If the deal came from a video, check the brand's official verified channel before believing it.

The 60-second verify checklist

Run this before you pay — it takes about a minute and catches almost everything:

  1. Type, don't click. Search for the retailer yourself and navigate to the offer from the official site. Never arrive at a checkout through an ad or message link.
  2. Read the domain letter by letter. Look for small twists, extra words, and odd endings.
  3. Compare the price against two trusted sellers. If an unknown store is dramatically cheaper than every known one, walk away.
  4. Skim the returns page and contact details. Copycat stores hide behind bare forms and throwaway email addresses; real stores have a real returns policy and a real phone number.
  5. Pay by credit card. Cards give you dispute rights if nothing shows up. Never pay by gift card, wire, or crypto on a store you haven't vetted.

The trust-tier decision framework

Score the store in one glance: Tier 1 — buy with confidence: the retailer's own official site or app, or a marketplace storefront with a long review history. Tier 2 — verify first: a smaller retailer you found through an ad; run the 60-second checklist before paying. Tier 3 — walk away: any two red flags, or any request for gift-card, wire, or crypto payment. There is no deal worth a Tier 3 purchase.

If you already clicked: the recovery sequence

  1. Stop entering information. If you haven't hit submit, back out. What you already typed is likely compromised; don't add to it.
  2. Change your passwords, starting with the affected account. Use a strong, unique password — a reused password is how one compromised login unlocks everything.
  3. Check your bank and cards. Fraud often starts small: $1–$5 test charges, odd merchant names, tiny withdrawals. Ask your bank for a card replacement or a temporary freeze if anything looks off.
  4. Run a security scan. Fake sites can drop malware or keyloggers quietly; scan for malicious downloads, browser hijackers, and unsafe extensions.
  5. Report it. Report the scam to the retailer being impersonated, the platform where you saw the ad, and your national fraud reporting center — reporting is what gets scam networks shut down.

What success looks like

A successful purchase ends with a charge on a credit card, from a store you reached by typing its address yourself, at a price that matched the rest of the market. If anything in that sentence isn't true, the purchase wasn't a success yet — it was a gamble.

Keep reading the playbook