The recent death of country music icon Dolly Parton has brought an outpouring of emotions and grief from her legions of fans who admired not only her music and acting, but also her extensive charitable endeavors including the Dollywood Foundation and Imagination Library. Unfortunately, scammers, as they always do, are taking advantage of anything that holds the interest of the public and are targeting Dolly Parton’s fans and admirers with a variety of scams including appeals for charitable organizations that appear to be affiliated with her. Dolly’s family asked that any donations be made to her Imagination Library which can be reached through her Dollywood Foundation. Using AI, scammers are able to send emails, text messages and social media posts that appear to come from the Dollywood Foundation and may contain links that take you to sites that also appear to be legitimate, but are merely AI created copies of her real charity website.
TIPS
Look at the URL. If you are making a payment, you would want the URL to be preceded by https rather than merely http. The “s” means that your communication is being encrypted and while even some phony websites may go the extra step and use encryption, most do not and so this is an easy way to spot a scam. Also, never use your debit card for online shopping because the protection you get for fraudulent purchases is much less than when you use your credit card.
Sometimes carefully checking the domain name for a counterfeit website will provide an indication that it is a scam. If the domain name has nothing to do with the real name of the company, you can be confident that is a scam. I would caution you however that merely because the name looks legitimate does not mean that it is. Often scammers will create phony, but very legitimate appearing domain names.
You can also use
Whois.com which is a free service that will tell you who owns a particular URL and how long it has been in service. If your Walmart website has only been around six months and is owned by someone in Nigeria, it certainly is a scam. Here is a link to Whois
https://whois.domaintools.com/If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is sign up for free using this link.
https://scamicide.com/scam-of-the-day/
