
Digital Marketing
Analysis finds social media used by less than 4% of people, while mobile phone connections are equivalent to less than 60% of Malawians.
E-COMMERCE SCAMS
By our News Team | 2021
Rise in online shopping equates to more dubious e-commerce sites that damage consumer confidence and result in lost revenue for businesses.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are becoming increasingly important to African retailers and are, in many instances, the kick-off to the traditional holiday shopping season.
But as online shopping becomes a bigger part of the African retail equation, so too do e-commerce scams that both damage consumer confidence and result in lost revenue for legitimate businesses.
In the lead-up to this all-important long weekend of shopping, threat-intelligence platform FortiGuard Labs has observed an increased number of scams involving counterfeit websites that appear to be legitimate e-commerce sites. FortiGuard is part of Fortinet, a prominent cybersecurity company.
Image by LillyCantabile from Pixabay
It warns that fake e-commerce sites are quickly becoming the latest threat to consumers and cover a wide range of products to lure potential buyers.
“We recently came across a live, active scam that leverages the look and feel of the world’s largest companies and their respective trademarks to compel and lure victims into making purchases from their site,” FortiGuard Labs notes in a blog post.
Dubious sites use the same template
“These sites are in no way affiliated with the trademark/IP owner, and are recognisable in part because they use the same template over and over in a digital game of ‘whack-a-mole’ (meaning that as soon as one site gets shut down, another one immediately pops up somewhere else).”
Among the prominent real-life brands that appear on these scam sites (obviously without their knowledge) are power tool giants Ryobi and Makita, coffee companies Nespresso and Keurig, and camping equipment company Coleman.
FortiGuard Labs says the scam e-commerce websites it has observed have the following characteristics in common:
According to the website Ecommerce News, quoting international statistics, retail stores now see 30% of all sales occurring from Black Friday through until Christmas. “This marks the actual Black Friday as the day that kicks off the busiest shopping season,” it says.
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