One of Minnesota’s largest companies, a favorite of scammers

It goes without saying that almost everyone is doing their best to survive right now. Gas costs more, just like everything else. People are starting to use coupons more and more to get the most out of their money, but it doesn’t seem like prices are rising as fast as prices.

Any time you can find a deal, you try to take advantage of it. But we’ve also learned that we need to be careful about who we trust with our purchases, especially with our debit or credit information.

Especially when we buy things online, make sure you are purchasing from a legitimate company or organization.

One of Minnesota’s largest and most successful companies has become a target for scammers. The Federal Trade Commission says Best Buy is one of the companies most often impersonated by thieves.

The FTC says 52,000 claims were filed with its office last year by customers who were scammed into thinking they were making a purchase from Best Buy or its computer support company Geek Squad.

Other major popular companies seeing claims of someone impersonating them include:

• Amazon
• PayPal
• Microsoft
• Publishers Clearing House
• Norton/LifeLock
• Apple
• Comcast/Xfinity
• bank of America
• Wells Fargo

If there’s a silver lining, Best Buy isn’t at the top of the list of money lost to the scammers. The customers who claimed to have lost the most money were the ones duped by scammers posing as Microsoft or Publishers Clearing House.

Those running these deceptive operations use most of the popular payment apps and there were even a significant number of people who paid for what they thought was a legitimate purchase using cryptocurrency.

This bears repeating: if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. And when it comes to your money, it pays to do your research to make sure you’re not throwing money away from someone who is misrepresenting the facts.

The Federal Trade Commission has two main goals: to promote competition and to inform and protect consumers. If you report that you were misled with a purchase, please contact the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 or https://reportfraud.ftc.gov.