Yes, Virginia, even Santa Claus may scam you.  A number of phony websites and postings on social media are offering personalized letters from Santa Claus that you can purchase for your children. Unfortunately, while the spirit of Santa Claus is real, many of the companies offering these letters from Santa are not and all that you end up doing is turning over your credit card number to a scammer who then uses it to make fraudulent purchases while you receive no letter from Santa Claus.  There are some legitimate companies offering letters from Santa for a fee, but it is important to check them out thoroughly before hiring their services. An easy first step to do that is to merely Google the name of the company with the word “scam” and see what comes up.

TIPS

While it is a bit late now, some good advice to remember for next year if you are interested in a free letter to Santa for your child is to use the United States Postal Service’s Letters from Santa program which you can reach using this link https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm

All you need to do is have your child write a letter to Santa Claus. Then write your own response from Santa Claus and mail both letters along with an envelope with the return address of “Santa, North Pole” and mail it to “North Pole Postmark Postmaster, 4141 Postmark Dr., Anchorage Alaska 99530-9998 and your child will get a personalized letter from Santa with a North Pole postmark at no cost to you. The deadline this year for receipt of the letters to Santa was December 10th, but you may wish to take advantage of this free service next year. The only cost is your postage.

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 has been cited by the New York Times as one of three top sources for information about Coronavirus related scams.

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