One of Minnesota’s Biggest Businesses A Favorite for Scammers

It goes without saying that most everyone is trying to their best to survive right now. Gas is costing more, along with everything else. People are starting to use coupons more and more to get the most for their money, which doesn’t seem to be increasing as fast as the prices are. 

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Anytime you can find a deal, you try to take advantage of it. But we’ve also learned we must be careful with who we trust with our purchases, mainly with our debit or credit care information.  

Especially when we’re buying things online, make sure you are making a purchase from a legitimate business or organization. 

One of Minnesota’s biggest and most successful companies has become a target for scammers. The Federal Trade Commission says that Best Buy is one the companies that is most often impersonated by thieves. 

The FTC says that 52,000 claims were filed with their office last year by customers who were scammed by thinking they were making a purchase from Best Buy or their computer support company Geek Squad.  

Other major popular companies who seeing claims of someone pretending to be them include: 

• Amazon 
• PayPal 
• Microsoft 
• Publishers Clearing House 
• Norton/LifeLock 
• Apple 
• Comcast/Xfinity 
• Bank of America 
• Wells Fargo 

If there is a silver lining here, Best Buy isn’t near the top of the list of money lost to the scammers. The customers who claimed to have lost the most amount of money were those who were dupped by scammers pretending to be from Microsoft or Publishers Clearing House.  

Those running these deceitful operations are using most of the popular payment apps and there was even a sizeable amount of people who paid for what they thought was a legitimate purchase with crypto currency.  

This bears repeating again, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. And when it comes to your money, it pays to do your due diligence to make sure you're not throwing money away from somebody who is misrepresenting themselves.  

The Federal Trade Commission has two main focuses, to promote competition and to educate and protect consumers. If you fill you’ve been misled on a purchase, you can reach out to the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or https://reportfraud.ftc.gov.