Over 800,000 people have been tricked into giving out credit card information and other private information by a worrying number of fake online fashion shops based in China. According to the UK, this is one of their biggest scams. The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Le Monde looked into how it works.
More than seventy thousand fake websites have been made as part of this scam. Reporters and IT experts looked at the data and said that the scam is very well planned. This business has a lot of programmers who work on an industrial scale and sell cheap items from Dior, Nike, and other prestigious designer brands.
People are tricked into giving private information on these websites by making them look like they are getting a good deal that they are not. The websites have nothing to do with the names they say they sell, and many people who believe they were scammed said they never got their items.
Almost ten years ago, the first fake shops opened, and in the three years since then, more than a million orders have been filled. A lot of the shops have been closed down, but about 20,000 are still open for business.
More than a hundred thousand victims in the US and UK have given out their email addresses, names, phone numbers, real addresses, credit card numbers, and three-digit security numbers.
Kate Hart, a lead officer at the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said, “These people are often part of serious and organized crime groups, so they are collecting information that they may later use against people, making people more vulnerable to phishing attempts.”
It’s true what many experts say: “Data is the new currency.” This is especially true for people who are running scams like this one.
