Thousands of fake stores. Their sole purpose is to steal credit card information
Shoes for a fraction of the price, designer handbags for pennies? This looks like a scam from a distance. Thousands of stores advertised on social media exist solely to scam credit card numbers. Polish experts detected nearly 10,000 such stores. Most of them are registered in China.
Leather shoes at a price three times lower than in the store, carefully tailored dresses, elegant handbags that a high-level manager would be proud of – all this in online stores that do not yet have much recognition, but aspire to be boutiques. There are only positive comments under the offers, often written in good Polish, other times the language is so poor that it is obvious that they come from a poor translator.
Fraudsters intercept credit card numbers
Active social media users regularly see ads from such stores. Some people stay away from anything because they smell fraud, others decide that “those who don’t take risks don’t drink champagne” and place an order. Champagne is only opened by fraudsters who are behind these shady shops. If all goes well, they will capture a complete set of customers’ credit card numbers.
“Dziennik Gazeta Prawna” reports that there are hundreds of stores on the Polish Internet that were created only to extort customer data.
“Polish experts detected 10,000 fake online stores run by a network of cybercriminals, probably operating from China. Only circumstantial evidence indicates the origin of the criminals – the store code has comments in Mandarin, and the cybercriminals’ addresses are on QQ, a free messenger from the PRC,” we read.
It was also reported that half of the websites found were addressed to European users, including Poles. “The offers of fraudulent websites concerned mainly footwear, and the second popular category was clothing (mainly sportswear),” it said.
The goal of cybercriminals is to extort payment card data in order to later sell it on the black market or immediately use it for a transaction unauthorized by the owner.
