Happy Holiday!
Buyers Beware
A public service announcement to those in the community. I have recently noticed a massive spike in Bot activity from countries with notoriously nefarious actors. Speaking with other retailers, this is very common and sites get scraped and spoofed. It has happened to me and others that I know.
The point here is if you see a product for sale that is new and is publicly being advertised at a massive discount at a retailer you haven't heard of before...it's probably fraud. This is common in the holidays for these bad actors trying to capitalize on a surge in sales.
If you go to a website and it looks like the retailer you are going to but suddenly pricing looks crazy, check the URL. Usually it is a minor misspelling or use of a greek letter (alpha in place of a) so that it is less visually obvious.
Credit cards and PayPal help but be vigilant.
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- 15 posts total
@verdantaudio + 1 |
Yes! Look VERY carefully at the URL if you use a search engine to get to a store's site. Yesterday my wife was re-ordering coffee from Stumptown - the site looked perfect - but she got an "invalid credit card" message, she thought it strange but tried another card - and got the same message. Looking at the URL she then noticed that the was an extra e - StumptowneCoffee in the URL. So, two credit cards to lock and replace. Almost all of our purchases are now made with Capital One Virtual cards - each vendor gets their own card number and that card number can be used only by that vendor. Our Stumptown Coffee purchasing predates our use of virtual cards unfortunately. Speaking with Stumptown they said they knew about this fake site and have been trying, without success, to stop the fake site from appearing in Google (etc.) search results. To a large extent today the search keys are embedded in structured metadata in the pages so that it is trivial to get any site to appear as a result for a search. I looked up StumptowneCoffee.com, in WhoIs and the deomain was registered on 12/02/2025!
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- 15 posts total