According to the official state register, there are 586 online stores in Hungary today that have problems with delivery, warranty or customer cancellation. But this list does not include those online stores and fake Black Friday advertising sites, where there is no store or customer service at all, there is no product, so there is nothing to deliver – states Quadron, which deals with cyber protection.
Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. The average product return rate ranges from 5 to 15 percent, and can reach 40 percent for certain product categories. That means many millions of returned products that Amazon resells to small businesses who market them as discounted products. One of the newest forms of internet fraud is based on this. “One of the most ingenious scams of the year is based on the business model described above, but with a new twist: scam websites claim that Amazon is selling off returned products to reduce warehousing costs, and for $30-$50 an entire pallet ( (Amazon Pallet) we can buy mixed electronic products, with free delivery to any part of the world,” says Ákos Solymos, head of education at Quadron Cyber Security Zrt.
Riding the wave of Black Friday shopping fad, fraudsters have registered thousands of fake domains selling Amazon pallets in the last couple of days, which are also being promoted on social media platforms with advertising campaigns, in which of course the “only available for three hours” urgency factor appears.
Advertisements offering portable solar systems, also for 30-40 euros, appeared in connection with Black Friday and the energy crisis. In such cases, the unrealistically favorable price may also raise suspicions. According to Quadron’s expert the goal of cybercriminals is to collect personal data and bank card data, and to steal users’ money. Quadron also provides some advice in its announcement. According to them, always look for the given product in the online stores of other reliable traders. If we find that the given product is significantly more expensive there or that they give a much smaller discount, then we can rightly believe that there is a scam behind the too cheap price.
Let’s examine the given website more carefully, read its general terms and conditions.
Search for the address of the online store on who.is, and if you see that the domain was registered a few days ago or only a few weeks ago, or there is no information about it, then it is likely that it is a fraudulent site created specifically for this campaign.
You can search here in the register of infringing domestic online stores. Search for the website address in a search program, adding the word “scam” to the search. The results will show whether other people have already had problems with the website and what they think about that page.
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