Some Nike sneakers for 20 euros, an Hermès bag for 100… Social networks have been flooded this Christmas season by advertisements for products at a real knock-down price and it has been excessively tempting for many not to click. After accessing these advertisements, the user came across a website with an appearance exactly identical to that of the advertised brand and it was almost impossible not to take advantage of an alleged bargain that never reached its buyers. The Police have issued a statement warning of this scam and proceeding to block these fraudulent websites.
The dynamics of this scam have always followed the same operation: the scammers cloned the web pages of the brands they used as bait, but hosted them in third countries (according to the authorities, mainly on servers in the United States). With these stores already duplicated, the next step was to camouflage the domains with regional extensions, that is, instead of the legitimate “Adidas.com”, they used a local extension, so that, at first glance, it was difficult to detect the fraud. The scammers subsequently used payment gateways in Brazil, and once the sale was collected, they kept the amount without sending the product.
It was the police themselves that initiated an investigation following a multitude of complaints from users scammed using this technique. The Police press office has confirmed to EL PAÍS that there have been more than 200 complaints, many of them using the address [email protected] for this purpose. The scammers, in addition to using the regional internet domains indicated above, in some cases modified the original brand. The police have informed this media that, for example, they added an “es” to the SCALPERS brand, or in the case of Massimo Dutti, the modification was cruder: “Massimo Clothing.”
The tip of the iceberg
Despite the high number of complaints, the authorities suspect that there could be many more people affected, since, due to the low unit amount of the fraud, “they do not report the facts” to the police authorities. The researchers, in any case, have blocked the reported websites in collaboration with the domain registration companies. The fact that this fraudulent campaign began during Black Friday and continued throughout Christmas has complicated things, since at this time advertisers intensify their campaigns and it is easy for a fraudulent ad to go unnoticed in an Instagram post.
How is it possible that it is so easy to carry out a scam on this scale? “Cloning a website is very simple,” Fernando Suárez, president of the General Council of Colleges of Computer Engineering, explains to EL PAÍS, “scammers simply download the page and clone it with another domain or adding a letter to the brand.” A simple scam, since “social networks make for very sweet offers,” he explains in reference to the advertisements on these pages with content cloned on social networks.
How to avoid deception
This scam is an updated version of the popular “stamp scam”: scammers promise a product at a price well below the market and run away with the money. Let's change “the little stamps” for clothes from “Massimo Clothing”, and the scam has been consummated. In this sense, the first alarm signal should be the very existence of a bargain that is too attractive: “You have to be wary of an excessively cheap offer,” explains Suárez.
This expert recommends an additional measure, in any case: do a search for the affected brand on Google and access the product offered from the search engine. What do you get with this? Scammers play in the short term and search engines do not have time to collect these pages, so the content offered by search engines has more guarantees of being real.
The authorities, for their part, recommend looking carefully at the URL of the product offered and being wary of any domain or extension that is not the brand's own. Suárez also suggests checking that the offer website “has the padlock” that verifies that the website is https (at the beginning of the URL) and, therefore, encrypted. The Police also point out spelling mistakes or inconsistencies in the content as an element of suspicion, since scammers usually give priority to executing the scam and do not take care of the details: poor quality images, bad translations, etc.
A final piece of advice for online purchases, as Suárez proposes, is to use a credit or debit card specific for this purpose “that can be easily blocked by the user themselves” and with a limited balance that can be recharged. In short, and as a general rule, apply the maxim of “no one gives money for nothing.”
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