We are still a few days away from the traditional Black Friday shopping day, but many people have already started their holiday shopping and scammers are already targeting these people with fake retail shopping websites designed to steal credit card information. According to cybersecurity researcher Arda Buyukkaya, a Chinese criminal gang known as Silk Specter has created 4,695 phony counterfeit retail websites that appear to offer big discounts on popular items. The sites appear to be those of popular, legitimate retailers such as North Face, IKEA, L.L. Bean and Wayfair. The counterfeit websites even use Google Translate to automatically change the language on the website depending upon the location of the targeted victim.
Victims of the scam are prompted to enter their credit or debit card number, card expiration date and CVV code as well as their phone number. All of this information can be used to access the victim’s credit or debit card and the phone number can be later used for text message scams.
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/Finally, look for reviews of the particular site and Google the name of it with the word “scam” and see what comes up.
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