GREENSBORO—It’s almost the most wonderful shopping time of the year.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just days away, many people are taking to their phones to download their favorite retailers' apps to cash in on deep discounts. But scammers are using a new kind of ID theft to steal your personal information.
The Better Business Bureau says the scammers are designing fake apps.
“These apps are look-alike, sound-alike and spelled alike,” said BBB president & CEO Kevin Hinterberger. “But what you'll find grammar errors, spelling errors and not many versions of the app itself when you open them.”
"It's everything from big names like Foot Locker to Michael Kors to the Dollar Tree,” said BBB spokeswoman Lechelle Yates.
The BBB says Apple's app store is getting flooded with apps that appear to be legit, but are fake.
"By most reports, many of these are coming from China,” Hinterberger said. “Apple does a pretty good job of vetting these apps before they arrive, but they do slip through from time to time."
The biggest dangers lie in when you use them to shop.
"They're going to get your credit card information,” Yates said. “There's a couple of other possibilities too. They may add some Malware, where they can go in and look on your phone and take information, or they add Ransomware to our phone and hold it hostage until we pay to get it back."
The solution: do your homework before you download.
"One of the big red flags is going to be broken English and misspellings,” Yates said. “With Foot Locker, for example, they left the 'r' out of 'Footlocker' and they smushed the words together, so it was one word instead of two."
The BBB says another thing you should do before you download an app is read the reviews of what other users are saying. Chances are, if someone's had a bad experience, they'll tell you.
The BBB also recommends going to a retailer's website and finding the link to download their app first.