#Tips to Protect Yourself from Online Shopping Scams # This is a long but beneficial article for your reading. # Do share it with your family members and friends to protect themselves from scams. Recently, right after the Double Eleven Shopping Festival, scammers began using the name of e-commerce businesses to conduct fraudulent schemes. According to our statistics, recently, the top three e-commerce names mostly used by scammers were "the KingStone Online Bookstore(26 cases)," "ADAM elements (17 cases)," and "486Shop (12 cases)." Scammers pretended to be customer service representatives of the said companies and told shoppers to go to an ATM machine for computer flaws but shoppers were then advised to wire their money to scammers. We analyzed the observed modus of scammers and listed the patterns below: 1. KingStone Online Bookstore: "The scammer pretended to be an employee of the Bookstore and told the shoppers that due to an 'order error' placed a couple of days ago, there is a 'membership upgrade mistake,' and 'repeated ordering.' The shoppers were requested to operate the 'ATM,' 'purchase game points,' and 'transmit on the Internet' to make a correction and then a bank or post office clerk will make a phone call to the shopper to build trust." 2. ADAM elements: "The scammer pretended to be an employee of the Company and told the shoppers that due to 'order error,' 'hacker attack' and 'invalid ordering and repeated amount deduction,' the shoppers were requested to operate an 'ATM,' 'purchase game points,' and 'transmit on the Internet' to make correction and then a bank or post office clerk will make a phone call to the shopper to build trust." 3. 486Shop: "The scammer pretended to be an employee of the Company and told the shoppers that due to 'setup errors as wholesalers,' 'ordering procedure error' and 'repeated ordering,' the shoppers were requested to operate an 'ATM,' 'purchase game points,' and 'transmit on the Internet' to make the correction and then a bank or post office clerk will make a phone call to the shopper to build trust." Scammers continued using new methods to request phone call recipients to operate an "ATM" or use an "online bank" to enter passwords that they designated by them to re-set (appearing to be bank accounts of the scammers) or to "purchase game points" for them to transfer game point passwords to other scammers and to steal away points from users. Hence, in order to prevent the public from scams, we reminded the concerned operators to tighten information security protection and provide ruling cases for compensation responsibilities resulting from disclosure of personal information. Businesses were called for compliance to the Personal Information Act to actively inform consumers of personal information disclosure for effective protection from scams. Meanwhile, the 165 promotion channel periodically announced shops with high scam risks and compiled information of scam cases to track down suspects. Finally, the public was remind to be aware of telephone calls with the beginning digits of "+," "+2," or "+886" and do hang up on the call immediately when the said conversation contents and keywords are mentioned and then report it to the anti-fraud hotline, 165.