Warning that Black Friday and Cyber Monday also attract the scammers

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:

• The domain names have only been registered for a few days to a few months.
• All sites are registered with the same registrar.
• They use ‘.top’ and ‘.shop’ top-level domains (although ‘.com’ is also common).
• They use stolen imagery.
• They contain numerous grammatical errors and inconsistencies in statements.
• Social Media buttons do not resolve anywhere, or go to accounts that either do not exist or have been deleted.
• Their web-hosting providers utilise content delivery networks (CDN) to remain anonymous via an IP address that cannot be traced.

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.