This year’s Christmas shopping season in now in full swing, and you know what that means…
Yep, the scammers are out in force on Facebook trying their best to scam innocent users out of their hard-earned money.
Every year lots of folks fall for the atrocious Secret Sister Gift Exchange scam.
A new variation of that same scam is making the rounds as we speak, and as with the old one the victims are being asked to send gifts to strangers with the promise of receiving a bunch of other gifts in return.
According to this alert from the Better Business Bureau, most of the fraudulent messages are asking that you send someone a bottle of wine or some other relatively low-dollar gift in exchange for the promise of receiving dozens of gifts in return.
As you can see, this is a classic Ponzi scheme type of scam where the first people to participate MIGHT receive a gift or two in exchange for their gift just to build up the scammer’s credibility with the Facebook community.
However, most people who take the bait and participate in the fraudulent exchange won’t receive anything at all. They’ll simply end up sending a $10 gift to a stranger (the scammer) while receiving nothing in return.
Even worse, in some variations of the scam the victim will be asked to “order” the gift from a fraudulent website and instruct the seller to send the gift to the recipient’s address.
Of course no actual gift will be sent but the scammer will end up with your credit or debit card information which they’ll quickly use to max out your card or drain your bank account with fraudulent purchases.
Pretty dangerous stuff, right?
Bottom line: If you see a post on Facebook or receive a message asking you to participate in this fraudulent gift exchange the best thing to do is ignore and delete the message without clicking on any links.