• Holiday scams are rising. Phishing and smishing attacks are targeting online shoppers.
• Scammers exploit the busy holiday season, using fake delivery messages to steal data.
• Law enforcement also warns of porch pirates.

Law enforcement and security professionals are warning of increased scam activity this holiday season.

Most holiday scams are phishing scams that can be found year-round, though scammers will theme their fraud to fit the season. An example could be a fake social media ad for a holiday product that sends you to a scam website or an email saying that a package you ordered for a Christmas gift is delayed and needs your approval.

"Remember, don't click on anything unknown, even if you just ordered gifts and you're expecting packages to come to your door soon," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a release. "Double-check before you click."

One of the most popular frauds this holiday season is a "smishing" scam involving text messages from people who claim to be the United States Postal Service, Melanie McGovern, the director of public relations at the Better Business Bureau, told Business Insider. The text message might say a package you ordered is delayed and include a link to a fake website that the scammers use to steal personal information.

"The biggest thing for people to remember is if they have opted into text reminders," McGovern said. "You have to opt in to receive any kind of text message from a retailer. Keeping track of what you ordered and where, how it's being delivered, is really important."

Scammers target the holiday season because it's a time when people are "super busy" buying gifts for loved ones, McGovern said. It can be easy to fall for a phishing scam during this time of the year, McGovern said, because of the commotion around holiday shopping.

"They're panicking, you know," McGovern said. "We're a week from Christmas, and they're like, 'Oh no, my package is being held up. It's something for my child. You're naturally going to go into panic mode."

One method to spot a phishing scam is to look at where the text or email is coming from, McGovern said. The USPS says it only uses "5-digit short codes" to send and receive text messages to and from mobile phones. One example of a fake scam text claiming to be from the USPS reviewed by Business Insider shows a +63 area code, which originates in the Philippines.

"They're phishing," McGovern said. "I got one the other day for my health insurance, and it looked like it was coming from your health insurance, until I looked at the address and realized it."

The most important thing to do if you think you are being scammed is to stop, pause, and look for warning signs, McGovern said. If you feel like something is off, there's a chance that it probably is.

Law enforcement agencies have also reported a rise in "porch pirate" activity, where thieves will steal a package delivered to someone's front porch. North Carolina Attorney General John Stein said in a holiday scam warning that it's important to track packages and make sure that you are home when they are delivered.

You can also set the delivery address to a neighbor's house who is home during the day, send the package to your workplace, or ask the post office to hold your mail and collect the deliveries there, Stein said.

• Deloitte UK has had a year of reorganization and cost-cutting amid a consulting slowdown.
• It is planning to cut staff travel and expenses by 50% for the rest of the financial year, the FT reported.
• The cuts to spending were short-term, a senior exec said in internal messaging.

The Big Four consulting firm Deloitte wants to cut its spending on staff travel and expenses by more than 50% in the UK, where it is headquartered.

In an email sent to partners and directors in October, Deloitte said the "firmwide cost management measures" were being introduced because of "challenging market conditions" in the UK, the Financial Times reported.

Deloitte reportedly said it was only aiming to maintain the cost cuts until the end of its current financial year in May and described the reduction in spending as "limited" and "temporary."

The email was sent by Sarah Humphreys, chief operating officer of the tax and legal division. Humphreys said Deloitte was also reviewing its "recruitment agency costs, licence fees, bad debts and global recharges," the FT reported.

The cost-saving efforts come after a year of reorganization and redundancies at Deloitte, as the firm grapples with an industry-wide slowdown in demand for consulting services that has hit revenue growth.

Deloitte's global consulting revenues grew by 1.9% in the 2024 financial year ending 31 May. The previous year, they grew by 19.1%.

"Like many organisations, we are looking carefully at our costs to ensure we're able to meet clients' needs while continuing to make investments in our firm and our people," Deloitte said in a statement shared with Business Insider Monday.

The downturn comes after many consultancies hired aggressively during the pandemic.

In March, Deloitte carried out a global overhaul of its operations aimed at cutting costs and repositioning it for future success. It simplified its core offering from five to four categories: audit and assurance, tax and legal strategy, risk and transactions, and technology and transformation.

It has also held several rounds of layoffs in the UK, where it has around 25,000 employees. In internal messages seen by Business Insider, Deloitte said layoffs of around 180 staff in September were "necessary to enable us to navigate the remainder of a challenging FY25."

The firm has also cut UK partner's pay to save on costs, leaving the most senior class of employees with roughly £50,000 ($63,000) less than the previous year — a 4.5% decline. UK partners still took home an average of around £1 million ($1.2 million) for the fourth year running.

Do you work at Deloitte? Contact this reporter in confidence to share your thoughts on the industry at [email protected]

Holiday shoppers aren't letting inflation ruin their gift giving with spending expected to reach record levels this year.

The big picture: Shoppers are projected to spend between $979.5 billion and $989 billion during the Christmas season, per an annual survey from the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.

By the numbers: Retail sales from November and December are predicted to beat 2023 by between 2.5% and 3.5%, NRF projects.

• Shoppers are budgeting a record of $902 each on average for gifts and seasonal items, like decorations and food.
• Online shopping is a main contributor of overall retail sales growth and is expected to increase between 8% and 9%. That's about $295.1 billion to $297.9 billion, per NRF.

What we're buying: The top gifts shoppers have purchased include clothing and accessories, followed by toys, gift cards, books, video games and personal care or beauty items.

Zoom out: With more shoppers out and about, retailers are hiring more workers to keep up with demand.

• Between 400,000 and 500,000 seasonal workers are expected to be hired this year, according to NRF. That's down slightly from 509,000 seasonal hires last year.

What they're saying: "The winter holidays are an important tradition to American families, and their capacity to spend will continue to be supported by a strong job market and wage growth," NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said.

More from Axios:

• The holiday shopping season is short, but Americans will spend anyway
• Record holiday travel expected to end a busy year
• What a government shutdown could mean for holiday air travel

• Recently, I visited London for the first time, armed with a list of touristy things I wanted to do.
• From eating in Borough Market to seeing Big Ben, I did so many quintessentially London things.
• I have no regrets about spending my three days in the Big Smoke in total tourist mode.

I'm a frequent traveler, but until recently, I'd never been to London. The Big Smoke has long been on my bucket list, so I planned a solo visit full of touristy activities like visiting Big Ben and touring the London Tower Bridge. While I wished my family could have gone along, my husband is often unable to take time off work and my teenagers have busy schedules of their own. I knew it would be a while before I could visit if I didn't take a solo trip.

Armed with a list of things I wanted to do, like visit a London pub and shop for quilted jackets in Notting Hill, I booked a flight and hotel and started packing. Here's what it was like to play tourist in London for three days, and why I have no regrets.

I went to London for the first time with a list of touristy things I wanted to do

While I knew I'd be doing touristy activities like snapping photos in a red telephone booth and riding a double-decker bus, I tried to balance the trip with some off-the-beaten-path things, too. I made a rule that I wouldn't eat at chain restaurants, and instead of booking pricey tours, I'd walk the city on my own and really dig into exploring everything I wanted to see.

I stayed in London's Stratford neighborhood because it was within walking distance of a major tube station and near Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, home of the 2012 Summer Games. In fact, I spent my entire first day in London exploring the Olympic Park, grabbing lunch inside, and checking out the Olympic-sized swimming pools used during the Games, along with other structures.

I had Indian food on Brick Lane, saw Big Ben, and went to Notting Hill for shopping

Indian food is my all-time favorite cuisine, and when I told friends I was going to London, each of them said I had to try the Indian food there. "Curry in the UK hits different," said one. And they were right. I spent my first evening on Brick Lane, home to many curry restaurants, and it was pretty empowering to wander out to dinner in a new city on my own and explore a bit.

I had other things on my London to-do list, too, like seeing Big Ben, shopping in Notting Hill, and eating the TikTok-famous chocolate-covered strawberries from Borough Market. Going into the trip with a list helped, and I was glad I'd done my research in advance.

Yes, British pubs are as much fun as they sound, even if you're sober

I haven't had any alcohol for the last year, but British pubs are such a fabled part of the culture in London that I knew I had to check a few out. To my surprise, pubs in the UK had just as many alcohol-free beer options as bars in the US. I could walk in, order a booze-less beer, and feel right at home while checking out the scene.

And yes, British pubs are as much fun as they sound. I loved watching everyone gather in beer gardens, cheers'ing with their friends, and laughing. There were live bands at some, and DJs at others. All of the pubs were thriving, full of life, and just as much a part of the culture as they sound in all the chick-lit I've read. Sober or not, seeing something I've heard about my entire life was very cool.

I spent time sightseeing and have zero regrets about behaving like a total tourist

I toured London's Tower Bridge, took photos in front of Big Ben, and visited Shakespeare's Globe Theater. Yes, much of what I saw in London was touristy, and I'm OK with that. As someone who woke up early with her mom to watch Princess Diana's funeral and grew up hearing about the Royal Family and their lives, it was surreal to see so many places I'd only ever seen on a news broadcast or movie screen.

I felt the most out of my element when I attended an evening show of Abba Voyage, an AI-generated Abba concert that makes the band members appear as if they are much younger and actually performing onstage. The show was an incredible and unique experience, but I realized I was not nearly as much of an Abba fan as the locals when I was among a crowd of young women, dressed up in sequins and belting out the words to "Mama Mia" with gusto.

I can't wait to go back and cross more things off my bucket list

I'm so glad I took the time to spend a few days in London, and touristy or not, my itinerary was truly the stuff my dreams were made of. With some online research, I created a full list of must-see items for my trip before I went, and I did it all. But there's so much more I want to see.

London is such a bustling city, and while I think I got a lot done for a first-time visit, I cannot wait to go back and do more. Next time, I hope to take my family along, and because I've spent so much time checking out parts of the city, I'm excited that I'll be able to play tour guide when they do visit.

• Aaron Goldsmid, head of product at Deel, has previously worked for Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter.
• Early in his career, Goldsmid said he over-indexed on emulating senior leaders.
• He also said he focused more on hitting OKRs than investing in relationships.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Aaron Goldsmid, a 44-year-old from San Francisco about mistakes he made early in his career. Business Insider verified his previous employment at Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I had a somewhat atypical journey into tech. My parents were Broadway performers, and I was the first person in my family to go to college.

I became interested in computer science in high school and broke into tech straight after studying computer science at Columbia.

Through the college recruiting process, I got a job at Microsoft in 2002 and spent nearly six years there, largely working in the security space.

During the 2010s, I held tech roles at Amazon from 2011 to 2012, Facebook from 2012 to 2014, and Twitter from 2014 to 2015, as well as working at several smaller companies.

I've been fortunate to work at some of the most iconic tech companies during interesting periods. I've taken tools from each opportunity and now apply them to my current job as the head of product for Deel, a payroll and HR platform.

Because my parents didn't have 9-to-5s, I sometimes struggled to determine how to succeed in the corporate world. I didn't have anyone telling me about things like checking boxes to get to the next level in my career and how frictional relationships can impact the workplace.

Now that I have two decades of career experience under my belt, I understand how to avoid some of the mistakes I made early on and plan a career more intentionally.

Mistake 1: Thinking one job ahead instead of two

When I informally coach folks about careers, I usually advise them to think two jobs ahead.

Instead of thinking about what you dislike about your current job and whether your next role will solve that, think two jobs ahead. I tell early career techies to ask themselves how their next role will get them to the role after that.

After leaving Microsoft, I moved from Seattle back to New York, where I grew up. I wanted to secure a job in the city, and because the tech scene wasn't as mature in New York in the early 2000s, I took a role at NBCUniversal, helping build their video streaming service.

I did good work in that role, but I'm not sure it necessarily advanced my career. I then joined a startup because they gave me a very fancy title, but I ended up leaving before completing one year because I felt there were problems at the company, and I realized I'd chased a title instead of thinking things through.

As I advanced in my career, I knew I needed to focus on the skills I needed to acquire rather than the prestige of a position.

When I joined Kiva, a microfinance nonprofit, in 2018, I didn't view it as a permanent job. I took the job to gain skills outside a product and engineering capacity.

During my time there, I learned about business development and communicated with UN officials and central bank leaders. Not only did I get to experience the challenges faced by other teams, but I also got to know different contours of the product, business, and customer experience.

When I moved into my next role, a general manager at the communications company Twilio, I had a broader scope of experience and could operate more effectively.

You can accelerate quickly into a senior role, but taking a less fancy role and diversifying your experience might mean your upside long-term is much higher. If you're thinking two jobs ahead, evaluate what opportunities will help you more in the long run. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Mistake 2: Not investing in relationships

Early in my career, because I didn't know how corporations worked, it was easy to think that everyone in a company was aligned and felt the same way, which is foolish.

When I worked at Twitter on their growth team, my job was to play in other people's sandboxes and tweak things. The company was having a difficult growth time, and we had to be hyper-focused on hitting our OKRs. This sometimes came at the detriment of my team's relationship with the rest of the product engineering org.

We had to step into other team's territories and move quickly. I felt I needed to hit a goal at all costs, and the problem was "at all costs." We often weren't on the same page as that team and had to go back and repair relationships afterward. In hindsight, I needed to do a better job of explaining why we were doing something from the outset.

Not everyone is trying to achieve a company's mission in the same way, and so by investing in relationships, you can more clearly communicate how you align with others in a company. Even if they don't align with you, they'll respect your process.

Mistake 3: Over-emulating senior leaders

Early in my career, I didn't have a role model in the corporate environment, so I questioned what "good" looked like and how I should show up.

Folks who are early in their career will often look at people who they think are successful and think, "I want to be just like them."

But sometimes, early-career workers have a hard time distinguishing the reasons for a person's success from their bad habits. They might not know things that the company has been willing to work around or that hold that person back.

Early in my career, I over-indexed on emulating senior leaders. For example, I'd see some of them making sweeping statements like "This is the future, or, this isn't the future." They can get away with that because they've proven themselves, but I'd do the same, and it would fall on deaf ears. I hadn't yet earned that level of credibility and still needed to "show my work" before I earned that trust.

As a senior leader at Deel, I'm very conscious about how I present myself to early career folks. In larger meetings, I remind myself that there will be people on the call who view my role through a limited set of interactions. I don't want to pass on any bad behavior or shortcomings for them to emulate.

Do you have a career story you want to share with Business Insider? Email [email protected]

• Homeowners are increasingly being dropped by their private home insurers.
• Regions with the highest nonrenewal rates are most prone to wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters.
• A new Senate report warns of economic risks as climate change destabilizes insurance markets.

Homeowners across the country are increasingly facing a stark new reality: they're losing their home insurance.

The share of home insurance policies from large insurers that weren't renewed increased last year in 46 states, a report released Wednesday by the Senate Budget Committee found. The increasing frequency and intensity of disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding and the rising cost of rebuilding have pushed many insurers to drop customers or hike premiums. This has left thousands of homeowners scrambling to find new insurance policies or joining the growing ranks of those going without insurance.

More than 200 counties saw their non-renewal rates spike threefold between 2018 and 2023. Counties in Northern California and South Florida saw among the highest rates of nonrenewals. Coastal counties in Massachusetts, Mississippi, and North Carolina also saw dropped policies soar. Manhattan ranks 20th, with rates of dropped policies rising from 1.25% in 2018 to 4.11% in 2023.

The national scale of home insurance nonrenewals was previously unknown because insurance companies are regulated at the state level. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners said not all states collect granular data about the availability and affordability of coverage in some areas. The association in March announced an effort with state insurance regulators to try to fill the gap.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse launched his own investigation into the homeowners' insurance market last year. He received nonrenewal data from 23 companies accounting for about two-thirds of the market. In testimony on Wednesday, Whitehouse said he demanded nonrenewal data because experts suggested policies being dropped were an early warning sign of market destabilization. He also said they correlated with higher premiums.

The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a lobbying group representing insurance companies, said nonrenewal data doesn't provide "relevant information" on climate risks. Many factors, including a state's litigation and regulatory environment, factor into nonrenewal decisions, the association said.

The association added that more costly weather disasters, combined with inflation and overbuilding in climate-risk regions, are making insurance less affordable for many Americans.

Home insurance premiums are rising in many regions across the country. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently reported that average home insurance premiums spiked by 13%, adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2023.

Most mortgage lenders require homeowners to purchase insurance, and some require additional insurance for specific disasters, including flooding. Insurers refusing to offer coverage can hurt home values because homes that can't be insured in the private market are less desirable to potential buyers.

The Senate Budget report warned that the insurance crisis will get worse as the climate crisis fuels more frequent and destructive disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding. A destabilized insurance market could "trigger cascading economy-wide financial upheaval," the report said.

"The failure to deal with climate change isn't just driving up the cost of homeowners' insurance, it's making it harder for families to even find homeowners' insurance, and that makes it harder to get a mortgage," Whitehouse said in a statement to Business Insider. "When the pool of buyers is limited to only those who can pay cash, it cuts off pathways to homeownership—particularly for first-time homebuyers—and risks cascading into a crash in property values that trashes the entire economy."

Have you been dropped by your home insurance company or are you facing a steep premium increase? Email these reporters to share your story: [email protected] and [email protected].

• You've heard of generative AI, but agentic AI might sound a little less familiar.
• Major industry players are working on AI agents for what some say marks the third wave of AI.
• But what exactly is agentic AI? Here's a quick rundown of the tech everyone's talking about.

Generative AI has been the talk of tech for a while now, but tune into your favorite business podcast and you'll probably hear a different phrase tossed around: "agentic" AI.

So what's the difference?

The two are closely related. You couldn't have agentic AI without generative AI. Definitions vary, but in general, agentic AI refers to AI technology that's capable of performing agent-like behavior that can autonomously accomplish complex tasks on your behalf.

Companies working on AI agents say they are intended to one day be digital coworkers or assistants to human workers in fields spanning from healthcare and supply chain management to cybersecurity and customer service.

Here's how some Big Tech companies explain the concept:

• Nvidia's definition says agentic AI "uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems."
• IBM says agentic AI is a system or program with "agency" that can "make decisions, take actions, solve complex problems and interact with external environments beyond the data upon which the system's machine learning (ML) models were trained."
• Microsoft says AI agents "range from simple chatbots, to copilots, to advanced AI assistants in the form of digital or robotic systems that can run complex workflows autonomously."

Some leaders in the field say agents are ushering in a new frontier in AI.

"In just a few years, we've already witnessed three generations of A.I.," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told The New York Times earlier this month. "First came predictive models that analyze data. Next came generative A.I., driven by deep-learning models like ChatGPT. Now, we are experiencing a third wave — one defined by intelligent agents that can autonomously handle complex tasks."

Salesforce, which launched its Agentforce suite earlier this year, has said it plans to have more than 1 billion AI agents in use for companies by the end of next year.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said the company has been "investing in developing more agentic models" over the last year. (He defined agentic AI as being able to "understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.") The company made agentic AI a major focus of its Gemini 2.0 launch this month.

OpenAI plans to launch an AI agent code-named "Operator" in January that would be able to use a computer on a person's behalf to do things like write code or book flights, Bloomberg reported last month, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The company previewed its latest AI model, o3, on Friday as the final announcement of its 12 days of "Shipmas" campaign.