A recent report recorded a rise of 178% in malicious e-commerce fraud websites observed from October to December of 2021, compared to the rest of the year.
What caused this impressive rise, how does this affect businesses who accept online payments, and how is the fraud landscape looking moving forward?
Malicious Shopping Websites on the Rise
Set up to coincide with the pre-holiday shopping period, an average of 5,300 new, malicious e-commerce websites per week were recorded from October to December, according to a report published by Check Point Research.
These scam websites were set up to resemble legitimate e-shops, often spoofing the appearance and branding of popular online shopping destinations, such as Amazon and Michael Kors. Customers would arrive by clicking through fraudulent emails or advertisements. They would get tricked into buying something, believing it was a legitimate product from a legitimate shop, at which point the criminal would acquire their card details and not ship them anything. Others tried to lure customers in through social media and hijacked accounts of friends and family.
This type of scam obviously targets consumers, in an attempt to steal their credit card details. However, a rise in this type of fraud also affects businesses, in several ways.
Here is how:
-Many of these stolen credit cards are later being used on legitimate e-shops, causing chargebacks. Each chargeback costs a business an estimated 2.60-3.20 times the price of the…
