HASTINGS, Neb. (KSNB) – For yet another year, online purchases comes in as the most common scam – this time for 2021.
The Better Business Bureau says it made up for 37.4% of all scams reported last year, with 74.9% of those reports coming with monetary loss. Officials say scammers have been shifting their tactics constantly to keep consumers guessing.
We caught up with Josh Planos, the Director of Public Relations & Communications for the BBB Serving Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas Plains & Southwest Iowa, before the newly released numbers, and he said while online shopping scams are nothing new, the pandemic is doubling down on the top scam.
“We saw more scam-related activity in the past three years than we have for any year on record,” Planos said. “We’ve issued scam alerts every week for 10-consecutive years, and we’ve never seen anything like what we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Planos went on to say that it likely wouldn’t be a surprise to see online shopping continue to be the top scam in Nebraska for years to come.
“We released an in-depth study on online shopping scams in December, which found that reports of this type of fraud nearly doubled from 2019-2020, and it was on that trajectory in 2021 though those numbers are not definitive as of yet,” Planos added.
As for why it continues to be such an issue, Planos said it’s easy to see the tell-tale signs.
”It was considered our riskiest scam type in 2020, and online shopping has more BBB F- rated…
