Remember to check before you buy

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2018 (2738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s exactly what you’ve been looking for —the outfit, the part, or the perfect piece to complete your fan cave.

If you’ve found it online, you may have reservations about the item’s or the seller’s authenticity. Most of us have found ourselves in this situation at some point. Our desire for the item competes with our doubt that the deal is legitimate.

There are savvy scammers who can create shopping experiences that seem real, and there are also less savvy businesses whose online profiles look sketchy but are actually real. This makes it hard to decide which category your purchase falls under.

There is a fast, easy way to find out. The Better Business Bureau keeps extensive files on both legitimate businesses and scams. To see if a business is real, customers can simply type its 10-digit phone number into bbbverify.us.

From there, they can check out the BBB’s rating of the company, actual reviews and complaints and whether or not the business is BBB accredited.

Companies accredited by the BBB give consumers an extra layer of reassurance because the BBB monitors these businesses regularly to ensure compliance to a variety of ethical standards.
If you’re still unsure about the legitimacy of a business or offer, you can also check it through BBB’s scamtracker at bbb.org/scamtracker. You can search for scams via keywords, and see popular ones in your area.

One recent victim of a scam reported losing more than $10,000 before realizing the company had an F rating with the BBB.

Using these tools together can give you peace of mind when spending your hard-earned money, and vastly increase your chance of getting what you paid for.

“BBB provides tools to empower consumers to fight back against fraudulent businesses and scams,” said Len Andrusiak, president and chief executive officer of the BBB serving Manitoba and northwest Ontario.

The BBB is a non-profit corporation that is able to provide customers with safeguards like scamtracker because of businesses that believe in boosting ethics.

“We are funded by the accredited business community that champion our vision to advance marketplace trust,” Andrusiak said.

As a consumer, it’s easy to think that you won’t fall victim to a scam.

But the BBB’s 2017 report showed Canadians lost more to scams last year than in the three previous years. They lost more than $95 million, a number that’s believed to be a lot higher because only a small fraction of people report their losses. The BBB and its accredited businesses don’t want you to be one of them.