Online shopping may make checking off your gift list easier, but fraud and cyber security experts warn it’s also the easiest place to fall victim this holiday season.

“Most of these scams come from overseas, so they’re really focusing on large luxury brands like Rolex, or, you know, Lululemon, or, you know, Louis Vuitton or big shopping stores like, you know, Macy’s or Apple,” said Tony Sabaj, who works in the Chief Technology Officer’s (CTO) office at Check Point Software Technologies, a cyber security company.

The best way to play it safe is to buy directly from a reputable source, he said in an interview on Sunday.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) also warned of misleading social media ads.

“Don’t click on an ad,” Kathy Stokes with the AARP Fraud Watch Network advised in an interview with ABC News earlier this month.

“Go to a trusted retailer that you’ve already done business with, you have an account with.”

And, if the price is too good to be true, Sabaj said it probably is.

“You know, people selling Rolexes for $250. Well, no reputable retailer is going to be selling a Rolex for $250, so if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably a scam,” he said.

Another telltale sign of a scam is the urgency, especially with email or text ads, Sabaj continued.

“Especially now that we’re in crunch time, we’re only a couple of days away from Christmas, so a lot of people may be more apt to fall for, you know, ‘Oh, it’s only available for the next two hours or three hours.’ Well, those are usually scams because they don’t know when you’re reading the email, so you know, they can’t say that a deal is only available for two hours,” he explained, adding that the same is true of scammers pretending to sell gift cards.

“Again, we’re seeing those scams where it’s like, ‘Oh, last-minute gift — Buy a Best Buy gift card,’ and you fill out a form. And you’re not really buying a Best Buy gift card, someone’s stealing your credit card information,” Sabaj said.

Suspicious links were a top theme in recent warnings from the BBB and the FBI. Fake shipping notifications have grown more common this year, some of them coming through text messages from scammers pretending to be a shipping service.

Sabaj’s advice: If you’re not sure if the message is from the source it says it is, do not click on it.

“Instead of clicking on that link, I’ll go to the UPS website myself,” he shared.

“I’ll go to the web page, and I’ll type in ups.com or usps.gov or fedex.com, and then I’ll type in, you know, the tracking number and see if there is actually an issue with that package, as opposed to clicking on, you know, a random, sort of shortened, sort of hidden link that may be in a text message.”

He said one of the best proactive defenses against malicious links is keeping your computer security software updated.

If you do fall victim to an online scam, immediately change your password on the site that the scammers were pretending to represent and any other sites where you’re using the same passwords, Sabaj advised.

You can also report the scam to the company being impersonated and the BBB to help make sure others don’t fall victim in the future.

Stokes emphasized the importance of not shaming victims of these scams.

“Understand that they were intentionally targeted by what’s largely transnational crime gangs. It’s a big problem. It is not the victim’s fault.”