A. Crooks take advantage of the calendar when planning their schemes to take your money, and they’re using your attempts to make a fresh financial start as their peg right now. You need to be particularly careful before signing up for any of these email credit-card deals or debt-relief programs.
– Credit-card scams. Just as you resolve to pay off your bills, scam artists step up their efforts to steal your money. Posing as bank employees, they call or email with offers to let you lower your interest rate by transferring your balance to a cheaper card. Once you give them your information, they use it to steal your identity or to make charges on your current card. Some low-rate offers are legitimate, but legitimate offers typically come through snail mail not email. Ignore all but the mail offers, and vet the one you want to pursue by looking up the bank’s customer-service number on your own and calling to find out if the offer is real. Also be alert to thieves who impersonate employees of your bank’s fraud department. The scammers claim they’ve found suspicious charges on your card and need extra information (such as your Social Security number or the security code on the back of your credit card) to protect you. Actually, they’re using the information to steal your identity. Bank fraud departments really have stepped up efforts to spot fraudulent charges, but if you get a suspicious call that asks for personal information, hang up and call the customer-service number on the back of your credit card.
– Debt-relief scams. Some debt-relief programs beef up their advertising (or spamming) to attract people who are trying to pay off holiday bills and charge them high up-front fees to negotiate with lenders; others charge high up-front fees and then disappear. If you need help getting out of debt, contact a credit-counseling agency. Credit-counseling organizations can provide budgeting help free and generally charge a small fee if you decide to sign up for a debt-management program. You can find a credit-counseling agency through the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (www.nfcc.org) or the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies (www.aiccca.org). And always check out any company with the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org), which keeps track of consumer complaints.
(Kimberly Lankford is a contributing editor to Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and the author of Ask Kim for Money Smart Solutions (Kaplan, $ 18.95). Send your questions and comments to moneypower@kiplinger.com. And for more on this and similar money topics, visit www.Kiplinger.com.)
