Pivoting off the chaos and uncertainty everyone is experiencing around the on-again, off-again tariffs and their constantly shifting parameters, scammers have quickly assembled a few new attacks on your bank account. They count on the fact that most of us aren’t economists or experienced with import/export law, so it can be easy to frighten or intimidate us into forking over money, especially because the one thing most of us know about tariffs is that they’re going to cost us money. Here are the tariff scams you need to be on alert for—and how to spot them.
Sometimes the scammer’s goal is to get you to make a payment, but often it’s just to collect your information via an official-looking form.
Fake messages about mail and packages
Another way scammers will try to leverage tariff confusion against you is by pretending to be a major shipping company like FedEx or UPS. They’ll send you an email claiming that you have a package being held because a tariff is owed, and direct you to a scam sight to pay to have the package released. This is a twist on an old scam, but uncertainty over who owes tariffs gives it a fresh sheen of legitimacy.
If you’re a consumer on a budget—and who isn’t these days—you might be excited to stumble on a social media post or email purporting to sell you stuff directly from factories in China or other countries without a tariff. They claim that the stuff is the same as name-brand clothing or other items, just without the branding, making them cheaper to offset any tariff-driven price increases. These sites are often pushed by so-called influencers on platforms like TikTok, who gush about avoiding tariff fees.
How to spot it: Anyone claiming they can circumvent tariffs is probably lying to you, and the old rule about things being too good to be true (i.e., they probably aren’t) always applies. If you see a post or video purporting to show a foreign factory selling items directly to consumers, it’s almost certainly a scam.
Fake tariff relief payments
Advertisements are showing up on social media claiming that there are various “tariff relief” payments going out, offering anywhere from $750 to $5,600. These are supposedly government programs to help us all survive the new reality of tariffs, and in the wake of previous government bailouts and stimulus payments they can seem plausible at first glance. Of course, if you click on any of these ads you’ll find yourself at a phishing site demanding every bit of sensitive information the scammers can think of.
Investment scams
Scammers are always trying to play off two things: Fear and greed. While there have always been investment scams involving fake accounts or dubious cryptocurrencies, the newest versions of these scams play on everyone’s fear of economic turmoil, claiming that a new investment product—typically in the cryptocurrency sphere—offers a risk-free safe haven from tariff chaos. While economies and national currencies might falter as trade wars escalate, the pitch goes, this nifty new version of money is unaffected by tariffs or other traditional economic factors and offers steady returns. Naturally, if you actually contact these sites and make an investment, your money simply vanishes, or you’re pulled into a Pig Butchering scam complete with a fake website showing you incredible returns on your investment that you will never actually be able to withdraw.
How to spot it: The most obvious sign of a scam investment is an unrealistic rate of return. Any investment that “guarantees” no risk of loss and a huge profit in a short time is almost always a scam. If it involves a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, you should definitely be suspicious. An increasingly common sign of a tariff-related crypto scam is a fake “endorsement” from a political figure—a scam targeting nervous Canadian investors, for example, used fake testimonials from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other officials to fool people. Government officials typically don’t endorse investments, and you should absolutely fact-check any you see without relying on links provided by the site itself.
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