Online shopping scams are fraudulent schemes for deceiving customers in many different ways. These scams could involve providing products or services that are entirely different from the ones displayed on the sites. They could also involve online sellers who disappear after receiving the customer’s payment. Some of these scams involve collecting the customer’s personal and financial information and then selling it on the dark web.
When you see a link to an advertised product or service, you should first check it for safety using the F-Secure Online Shopping Checker tool. This tool checks a domain name against the known good or bad sites. Using this tool is very easy – all you have to do is visit https://www.f-secure.com/en/online-shopping-checker copy-paste the URL or domain name into the space provided and click on the Check Website Safety button.
If the online shopping site is safe, it will display the information about the site with “All Good” in green color. You can then proceed to do your online shopping with peace of mind. However, even then you should practice the usual online safety precautions. You should check whether a seller on these shopping sites is genuine and has good reviews.
On the other hand, if F-Secure finds out that the website is not safe, it will show “Not Safe” in bright red. It will also warn you about the possible threats you might encounter on such sites. You can lose your hard earned money, your identity might be stolen, your account could be stolen (in the case of a phishing site), and it can even download malware on your PC.
F-Secure also offers F-Secure Total which is complete protection for your Windows PC and Apple Mac computers. It can block viruses and malware, protect you from online threats, defends you against identity theft, and offers free VPN with each subscription.