Talk of the Town Podcast: Staying Safe Online #6 – Holiday Scams

Welcome to HakProof.com. This site is my attempt to reach out beyond the physical classroom to the community at large to help each of you increase your personal SQ or Security Quotient.  Today was my sixth visit to WHTC 1450 AM radio station in Holland Michigan to be a guest on the daily show, Talk of the Town.

Click on Link to access the Podcast, of my time on today’s show:

http://whtc.com/podcasts/talk-of-the-town-today/99/cyber-security-with-james-allen-nov-30/

I promised the listeners to provide an outline of what we talked about today. Hopefully, you will also find the information beneficial.

Holiday Scams

Here is the original link to the list I spoke about on the radio.

‘Tis The Season To Be Wary: 12 Holiday Scams to Avoid

I won’t duplicate the article here, but I do want to stress the need to do a least a little research into your holiday opportunities to make sure you are not being taken advantage of. The fraudsters trying to steal from you do not share your holiday cheer.

Remember to use reliable services like Paypal or Amazon Pay to minimize the chance of credit card fraud and use a credit card instead of a debit card when needed so you will be able to more easily contest bogus charges to your account or to stop a transaction if you realize intime that you have been had.

One of the callers today spoke of loosing control of his email account for a period of time and not all his mail goes to the trash instead of his inbox. Below is a link that may help fix the problem:

  • This link has multipe sugestions for solving the problem if you are using gmail.