Since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, the demand for disinfectant products made by Clorox and Lysol has been high with stores temporarily running out of these products at times.  Taking advantage of the high demand for these products, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), scammers have been setting up phony websites that purport to sell Clorox and Lysol products, but consumers using these websites to purchase the products end up paying for products they never receive.  Now the FTC has gone to court and obtained a temporary restraining order shutting down 25 of these bogus websites.  Among the phony websites closed down were cleanyos.com cleankler.com, clorox-sale.com, crlysol.com and lysol-cleaners.com.

TIPS

When buying anything online it is important to make sure you are dealing with legitimate companies.    Choosing to deal with well established companies with which you are familiar is a good option.  If you want to consider doing business with companies with which you are not familiar, you should do an online search for any complaints against the website.  You also may wish to do a whois.com search to find out who owns the particular website and if it originates in a place such as North Korea which is known for such scams, you should not do business with the particular website.

Whenever you do business online you should only use your credit card and not your debit card because the consumer protections provided by law for fraudulent purchases are much greater when your credit card is used for a fraudulent purchase than when you use your debit card.

For those of you receiving the Scam of the day through an email, I just want to remind you that if you want to see the ever increasing list of Coronavirus scams go to the first page of the http://www.scamicide.com website and click on the tab at the top of the page that indicates “Coronavirus Scams.”  Scamicide was recently cited by the New York Times as one of three top sources for information about Coronavirus related scams.

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and click on the tab that states “Sign up for this blog.”