While online shopping makes it easier to check off your gift list, fraud and cybersecurity experts warn that it’s also the easiest place to fall victim this holiday season.

“Most of these scams come from overseas, so they’re really focused on big luxury brands like Rolex or, you know, Lululemon, or, you know, Louis Vuitton or big box stores like, you know, Macy’s or Apple,” Tony Sabaj said , who works in the office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Check Point Software Technologies, a cybersecurity company.

The best way to be safe is to buy directly from a reputable source, he said in an interview Sunday.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) ​​also warned about misleading social media ads.

“Don’t click on an ad,” Kathy Stokes of the AARP Fraud Watch Network advised in an interview with ABC News earlier this month.

“Go to a trusted retailer that you have already done business with and have an account with.”

And if the price seems too good to be true, Sabaj says it probably is.

“You know, people sell Rolexes for $250. Well, no reputable retailer will sell a Rolex for $250. So if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably a scam,” he said.

Another telltale sign of a scam is urgency, especially with email or text ads, Sabaj continued.

“Particularly now that we’re in crisis time and there’s only a few days left until Christmas, a lot of people might be more inclined to fall for, ‘Oh, it’s only available for the next two hours.'” or three hours .’ Well, those are usually scams because they don’t know when you read the email, so they can’t say an offer is only available for two hours,” he explained, adding that the same thing too for applies Scammers pretend to sell gift cards.

“We’re seeing these scams again where it’s like, ‘Oh, last minute gift – buy a Best Buy gift card,’ and you fill out a form. And you’re not actually buying a Best Buy gift card, it’s someone stealing your credit card information,” Sabaj said.

Suspicious links have been a major theme in recent alerts from the BBB and FBI. Fake shipping notifications have become more common this year, some of which come via text messages from scammers pretending to be a shipping service provider.

Sabaj’s advice: If you are not sure whether the message came from the specified source, do not click on it.

“Instead of clicking that link, I go to the UPS website myself,” he shared.

“I go to the website and type ups.com or usps.gov or fedex.com, and then I type in, you know, the tracking number and see if there’s actually a problem with that package, as opposed to clicking a random, shortened, hidden link that may be in a text message.”

He said one of the best proactive defenses against malicious links is to keep your computer’s security software up to date.

If you become a victim of an online scam, immediately change your password on the site the scammers claimed to represent and on any other sites where you use the same passwords, advises Sabaj.

You can also report the scam to the company impersonating and the BBB to ensure no others become victims in the future.

Stokes stressed the importance of not shaming the victims of these scams.

“Understand that they were deliberately targeted by largely transnational crime gangs. It’s a big problem. It’s not the victim’s fault.”