After waves of deceptive sites selling hand sanitizer, N95 masks, fake coronavirus cures and medicines, etc. many of these deceptive sites are now disguising themselves as e-commerce sites. The techniques used by the scammers are still the same. These scam e-commerce sites that exist for only a matter of days. They rip off consumers, and disappear. They charge the consumers’ credit cards with no intention of ever shipping any product. They also appear to be harvesting credit card numbers, real home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. These are highly scalable operations because every step can be fully automated.
The scam:
Heavily advertise on FB, Instagram, mainstream sites via programmatic ad tech
Take orders from consumers; charge credit cards
Contact Us is online form – no phone number, no physical address
Products were never intended to ship
Scammer does this to collect credit card numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, etc.
Site disappears after X number of days
How fraudsters do it, at scale:
domains are newly registered, usually less than 100 days old
registrants are hidden or anonymized
sites built automatically with Shopify e-commerce templates
buy cheap ads through exchanges to get ads on mainstream sites like yahoo.com
