Online shopping an opportunity for cyber-crooks to trick consumers

HOUSTON - Sales for this year's Cyber Monday were down a bit over last year, but American consumers still spent $10.7 billion for online purchases. Now, as we wait for our packages, cyber-crooks are ready to take advantage and trick consumers into sharing the holiday spirit.

For a lot of us, our smartphones can be a noisy nuisance of email, text, and social media updates. It's particularly important, this time of year, to pay attention to any messages about purchases.

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"You need to understand, when you go on the internet, everybody's watching you," warns Houston tech-expert Juan Guevara Torres.

He says most of the watching is perfectly legitimate. When logging onto a new website, there's often a pop-up box asking for permission to use 'cookies'. They're packets of information that allow the site to track your browsing and create a profile of who you are. That's valuable information that's legitimately for sale, for marketing purposes, but traded by crooks as well.

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That's the information behind some of those smartphone messages. Some of them look like friendly updates on where your packages are, or opportunities for free stuff, with a convenient link to access the information. Clicking the link is a terrible idea.

"We don't think about that might be a phishing attack, someone impersonating Amazon," says Guevara Torres, "That's when they get you."

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If you've not heard the terms, phishing is the practice of impersonating a reputable company, often with fake websites and email, to trick people into sharing personal information. Clicking one of those crooked links is likely to install an electronic trap-door to let someone take whatever they find.

"Once it's injected into our phone, it can access contacts, it can access phone logs, it can track your keystrokes, and send it out somewhere," says Guevara Torres.

The obvious protection is to read and pay attention to all those notifications, and only deal directly with a business. Meantime, if your phone is suddenly running out of memory, running slowly, or the battery doesn't last as long, those could be indications that you've got some unwelcome company. Guevara Torres says a hard reset may be the best option to kick any crooks out.