Getting Ahead of Holiday Shopping Scams While It's Still Summer

By the time the holiday shopping season is actually underway, the conditions that make scams effective are already in place: real deadlines, real time pressure, and a flood of legitimate promotional emails that make fraudulent ones easier to hide among. Late summer, with none of that urgency yet, is a much better time to build the habits and safeguards that make you a harder target once the season starts.

Turn on the alerts and tighten the recovery settings now

Most banks and card issuers offer instant transaction alerts — a text or push notification the moment a charge posts. If you haven't turned these on, do it now rather than during the season, when a flood of legitimate purchase notifications could make you tune out an alert for a fraudulent one. Getting used to the pattern of alerts in a quiet month makes an unusual one easier to spot later. This is also a good time to review the recovery email and phone number on your major shopping and financial accounts, make sure they're current, and enable multi-factor authentication anywhere it's offered but not yet turned on — unglamorous, quiet work that's much easier to do without a "your package couldn't be delivered" text creating pressure to act fast.

Learn the recurring shapes before you're expecting packages

A lot of seasonal scam activity leans on the same handful of shapes: a delivery notice with an urgent link, an ad for a retailer that doesn't actually exist beyond the ad itself, and a request — from a caller, an email, or someone claiming to be a family member — to buy gift cards and share the codes. None of these require sophisticated detection once you know the shape: legitimate carriers don't collect redelivery fees through text links, unfamiliar retailers deserve more scrutiny than ones you already know, and no legitimate emergency is ever paid for in gift cards.

It's worth extending this same skepticism to shopping-adjacent scams that ramp up alongside legitimate holiday sales activity

Marketplace and resale-app scams follow a related pattern worth knowing in advance too, since secondhand shopping tends to pick up alongside the broader season: a deal priced well below market, pressure to move the conversation off the platform's own messaging and payment system, and a request for payment through a method that offers no buyer protection.

Recognizing that shape now, before the season adds volume and urgency to every transaction, makes it far easier to walk away from a deal that looks too convenient to be real. It's worth extending this same skepticism to shopping-adjacent scams that ramp up alongside legitimate holiday sales activity — fake coupon codes that ask for account credentials to "unlock" a discount, or surveys promising a free gift card in exchange for personal information. These follow the same basic structure as the other scams here: a plausible-sounding reward, mild urgency, and a request for information or payment that a legitimate promotion would never actually require. Building a working mental list now of the retailers you already know and trust gives you a fast check during the season — is this a store I already knew about, or one I only just discovered through an ad. New discoveries deserve more scrutiny, not less, exactly when you're least likely to give it.

Check your baseline before the season adds noise

Reviewing your credit reports for accounts or inquiries you don't recognize is worth doing on a normal schedule, but doing it specifically before the holiday season gives you a clean baseline. If something unusual shows up in December, having checked in late summer makes it much easier to tell whether it's new or something you missed. It's a small task that pays off specifically because the season itself makes everything noisier and harder to evaluate calmly.

The same logic applies to your passwords. If you've been meaning to update weak or reused passwords on your major shopping and financial accounts, late summer is a better window to do it than during the season itself, when you'll want those accounts working smoothly rather than mid-update.

None of this needs to happen all at once. Spreading these tasks across a few weekends in late summer — alerts one week, account recovery settings the next, a family conversation after that — makes the whole project manageable rather than another item competing for a single afternoon's attention.

Have the family conversation before it's urgent

If you have family members who are more frequent targets for phone or text-based scams, a calm conversation in the summer — walking through what a delivery scam or a gift-card request actually looks like — lands very differently than the same conversation in a panicked phone call during December. Timing this conversation before the season, without the pressure of an active scam attempt, makes it far more likely to actually stick. It's worth agreeing, as a family, on a simple rule in advance: any urgent financial request gets verified through a separate, already-known phone number before anyone acts, no matter how convincing or embarrassing the situation is made to sound.

The bottom line

Scam prevention works better as a calm, unhurried project than as a reaction to something urgent-sounding in your inbox. Turning on transaction alerts, tightening account recovery settings, learning the shape of delivery and gift-card scams, and having a level conversation with vulnerable family members all take less time in August than they will in December — and they're most useful precisely because they're in place before the season's real pressure begins.