Thousands of imposter websites discovered mimicking top brands to steal your banking info
A newly published report from the automated brand protection firm Bolster has discovered a campaign that has been active since June 2022 and whose mission is to steal people’s banking and credit card data by impersonating more than one hundred popular clothing, footwear and apparel brands. These brands include Nike, Adidas, Puma, Skechers, New Balance, Timberland, Reebok, Vans, The North Face, Fossil, Guess, Kate Spade, Casio, and more.
How do these scammers impersonate such popular brands?
Researchers found that the way scammers have been working is by creating fake websites that look like they legitimately belong to the popular brand they are impersonating. The campaign has previously registered at least 3,000 domains and around 6,000 sites to trick shoppers.
The scammers disguise the websites to look similar to a company’s actual website and will make the fake website URL look legit as well by combining the brand’s name with a city or country and following it up with a generic top-level domain (TLD) like “.com”.
For example, one website that has been proven to be fake was “www.puma-italia.com,” which was a website run by scammers to make online shoppers in Italy believe they were shopping on the Italian version of Puma’s online store.
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How does the scam play out?
When a person searches for the brand name, these impersonation sites appear as the second or third result on popular search engines like Google;elm:context_link;itc:0″ class=”link “search engines like Google. Then, once the scammers trick a shopper into buying a product on the fake