How the Experts Dodge Online Shopping Scams
Cybercriminals love the holiday shopping season. Their potential victims are all caught up in the frenzy of shopping, finding the best deals and acting quickly to take advantage of limited offers. Email andsocial networksare clogged with sales and offers, both legitimate and fraudulent.

So what's a security-conscious consumer to do?

"Be paranoid ... trust nothing," is a good motto to keep in mind, said Anup Ghosh, chief scientist at Invincea, an enterprise Internet-security provider in Fairfax, Va.

Ghosh recommends looking at every incoming email with "an extremely healthy dose of paranoia and suspicion."

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While products exist to scan and block malicious links, consumers must also train themselves to question every email and online-shopping deal they come across.

Scams are especially prolific at this time of the year, with fake deals and offers flooding email inboxes and social networks, trying to direct customers to counterfeit sites or survey sites.

Fake websites and ads trick users into visiting sites designed to steal financial data or personally identifiable information.

"You simply will not be able to distinguish a spoofed site from the legitimate site by look and feel," Ghosh warned.