Black Friday is 22 days away (November 27, the day after Thanksgiving; Cyber Monday is the 30th), and the cheapest part of the trick is already happening: the "regular" price creeping up, slowly. Take a robot vacuum, for example. In October it cost $319.99. On November 14 it's $379. On Friday the 27th it shows up with 30% off at $265.30, in big red letters. It looks like a bargain. But against the October price, your real saving is $54.69, not the $113.70 the strikethrough suggests. The example is one I made up, but the mechanism is well known to regulators. Under the FTC's pricing guides, a "was" price has to be genuine, and raising a price for a few days without real sales at that level, then advertising a "sale" off it, can be considered deceptive. The catch is that there's no single national countdown. California, for instance, requires that an advertised former price was the prevailing market price within the three months before the ad, unless the retailer clearly states when that price was in effect, while New Jersey asks for the higher price to have been offered for at least 28 of the preceding 90 days. Which rule protects you depends on where the seller is and where you live. Be wary too of "MSRP" or "list price" strikethroughs, which aren't the same as what the store actually charged. A consumer watchdog once claimed that reference prices on Amazon were higher than any actual price of those products in the previous 90 days, which Amazon denied. ## Today's screenshot You can still do the one thing that helps most. Pick half a dozen products you really want and take a screenshot of each price today, with the date visible on your phone. For Amazon listings, price trackers like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa show the chart of the last few months, and Google Shopping shows price history on many products. If the line spikes upward in the two weeks before the campaign, you know what you're looking at. I think the Black Friday conversation gives too much weight to fake shops and too little to the weak discount in a real one. The first scam takes everything, that's true. The second happens in doses of $35 or $65, and nobody files a complaint over $65. ## The shop that only lives until Monday This is a different matter. Here the product never even arrives. The pattern repeats: prices about 70% below the rest of the market, a footer with no company name, no physical address and no phone number, a generic contact email, and payment only by wire, gift card or crypto. A cheap trick that works is checking the domain's registration date on a WHOIS lookup. A shop that swears it has ten years of history and whose domain was registered in October has a credibility problem. The ads are often the way in. That Facebook ad showing the exact gadget you've wanted at half price might be a scammer using stolen photos, and many fake stores disappear after collecting payments. Look up the store's profile at the Better Business Bureau and search its name on BBB Scam Tracker. And I'd add one simple thing: copy the exact model name, paste it into Google and type "scam" after it. If the shop is fake, someone is already complaining. ## What if the deal came by text? Don't tap. Open the retailer or your bank by typing the address yourself, or through the app you already have installed. Urgency is the tool of whoever sends these messages: "you have 15 minutes to confirm", "final delivery attempt". This summer the FTC warned about texts offering Amazon refunds, where people who tapped through landed on fake support pages that collected personal and financial data. On Black Friday the bait shifts to packages and gift vouchers, but the rush is the same. You can report these texts to your mobile carrier by forwarding them to 7726 (SPAM), or to the FTC. ## At checkout, look at the address Sometimes the shop is real and the trouble sits in how you pay. Before you type your card number, look at the address at the top. If the page redirected you to a domain that has nothing to do with the store or a payment processor you recognize, stop. Then there's the payment method. The FTC has warned people against paying via gift cards, wire transfers, cryptocurrency and payment apps, all common ways scammers get paid. One reader story from a consumer-security site is typical: after sending payment through Zelle, the "seller" disappeared, and the gift cards turned out to be fake or already used. A credit card is the opposite case. Credit cards offer consumer protection if you need to claim your money back, and so do wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. If your card issuer offers virtual card numbers, use one for shops you've never heard of. And always keep the order confirmation and a screenshot of the promotion. ## Already paid Lock the card first. The advice from consumer-fraud experts is to act quickly and immediately lock any card that may be compromised. Then call the issuer and ask about disputing the charge. Under federal law, credit card holders can dispute billing errors, generally within 60 days of the statement date, so don't sit on it. Keep screenshots, emails and the transaction number, and report the scam to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. For online scams you can also file with the FBI's IC3 at ic3.gov. Getting the money back isn't guaranteed, but time matters. One detail almost nobody reads: no federal law gives you a general right to return something you bought online. The retailer's own return policy is the only guarantee you have, so read it before checkout and screenshot it, because holiday policies often differ from the usual ones.