A China-based e-shop chain is behind one of the world’s biggest online scams, defrauding thousands of people in Europe and the US.
They are victims of historical fraud more than 800,000 people which shared their card details and more and more sensitive personal data with a fake e-shop network. The same time, 476,000 of them have provided debit and credit card details, including their three-digit security number. All provided names, phone numbers and e-mails.
The international investigation by the Guardian, Die Zeit and Le Monde newspapers brings to light the mechanisms of the ring, which the UK’s Chartered Trading Standards Institute described as one of the biggest scams of its kind, with 76,000 fake websites created.
The volume of data reviewed by journalists and IT experts shows that the business is highly organized, technically intelligent – and is constantly evolving.
Developers, operating on an industrial scale, have created tens of thousands of fake online stores offering discounted products from the companies Dior, Nike, Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Versace and Prada, as well as many other premium brands.
Available in multiple languages, from English to German, French, Spanish, Swedish and Italian, it appears that they are created to trick buyers into parting with money and sensitive personal data.
However, the sites have nothing to do with the brands that they claim to sell and in most cases the consumers who spoke about their experience stated that they did not receive any product.
The scam developers have been tricking their supposed customers since 2015, with one million fake orders in the last three years.
Many of these e-shops have gone down, but a third of them – more than 22,500 – still in operation.
“One of the biggest fake store scams online”
Chief officer at the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, Katherine Hart, described the ‘business’ as ‘one of the biggest online fake shop scams I’ve seen’, adding: ‘Often these people are part of serious and organized crime groups, so they collect data and may use them against people later, making consumers more susceptible to phishing attempts.”
“Data is the new currency,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity consultant at software company ESET. He warned that such collections of personal data could also be valuable to foreign intelligence agencies for surveillance purposes. “The bigger picture is that one has to assume that the Chinese government may potentially have access to the data,” he added.
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