The golden rules of safe shopping online have changed in recent times.
These guidelines apply whether you are buying a car, an air-fryer or a hair-dryer online. Be wise to the new rules on spotting fake websites.
Fake Scam Sites Are Far More Sophisticated Now
Con artists and fraudsters are becoming more advanced. They know what advice has been around for years to consumers looking to spot fake websites.
They are investing time and money having websites developed to a far higher standard.
Even going as far as cloning companies that already exist therefore when you run checks on them, they appear to be well established and in some cases even show up in Companies House records and Google Maps as legitimate businesses.
A recent case as reported by the BBC shows the sophistication lengths that some fake websites go to. The case of Auto-Promotions, a fake used-car dealer operated in the UK for months before it was eventually shut down by police and trading standards. This site sold used-cars that didn’t exist.
Link to news article about fake used-car site: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63047193
Online Shopping In 2022
4 Rules That Will Keep You Safer
If you are making any purchase online from a company that you haven’t previously heard of, these are the 4 checks you should apply.
- Never Pay by Bank Transfer
- Use Reputable Payment Gateways
- Read Genuine Online Reviews
- Question Offers That Are Too Good To Be True
1. Never Pay by Bank Transfer
If the site insists or suggests that you should make the payment by bank transfer, STOP.
Pay by credit card rather than debit card. Credit cards offer far better liability protection, therefore if you have to dispute a payment, most credit cards have a zero-fraud liability protection. This makes reclaiming money from your bank far easier.
2. Reputable Payment Gateways Don’t Fail
Online retailers use payment gateway services to take the payment. These gateway services such as PayPal, Pay360, Amazon Pay, Stripe, WorldPay, Elevon, etc. give the retailer protection from fraudulent customers. They also give you, the customer, protection and ability to dispute payments.
Most reputable sites will offer more than one payment gateway method.
Additionally – when a payment fails, question it.
If you attempt to make an online payment and the transaction fails once you have entered your card details, alarm bells should ring at this stage.
Why?
Maybe you have in fact just sent your card details away to a scammer. Perhaps the checkout page was meant to fail. It was in fact a page designed using a contact form script and your card details including the security digits have just landed in the inbox of a scammer 10,000 miles away!
Reputable Payment Gateways Do Not Fail
If you have entered your details and receive a message saying “sorry your payment failed, please try again” immediately ring the telephone number on the back of your bank or credit card. Your bank will freeze the transaction and be able to put a higher alert status on your account to stop future unauthorized payments being taken from your card. Having alerted your bank, they become liable for any unauthorized funds being drawn during this period.
Furthermore, if you receive an email from the seller suggesting that you should complete the payment by bank transfer, stop and report this site.
In the UK, to report a scam website this can be done by visiting the NCSC on this link: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/phishing-scams/report-scam-website
3DSecure v2
The new standard for PCI compliance is called 3DSecure v2 (3DSv2). This allows the consumer to confirm their identity with biometric authentication such as fingerprint or face recognition on a mobile device.
3DSecure v2 creates a far more secure interaction between the consumer, their card issuer and the merchant. Not only does this improve protection against lost or stolen cards, it also presents scammers with the huge issue of becoming 3DSv2 verified.
This protocol is rolling out now and replaces a 16 year old system that was in place for payment gateways. This will soon be the only method that is accepted to make online payments.
3. Read Genuine Online Reviews
Before making a purchase, run a check on the company. Open a new browser and search for the company, followed by the word “reviews”.
However advanced and sophisticated scams will have this covered by populating fake review sites with good reviews. Use Trustpilot. Trustpilot are incredibly good at filtering out fake reviews.
Don’t be put of making a purchase if you see one or two poor reviews. Look instead at the overall rating on Trustpilot and sort-by-date to make sure you are reading the latest reviews.
Reputable online sellers go to huge efforts to get good reviews on Trustpilot. Whereas scammers would be unable to flood the site with fake good reviews without Trustpilot detecting this.
In the UK you can also check www.complaints.uk which will run a scan on multiple review sites giving an overall rating.
4. Question Offers That Are Too Good To Be True
This is probably the oldest “alarm bell” sign that a site may be fake. And it still applies today. No further explanation required for this section as it would be an insult to your intelligence.
Advice That No Longer Applies to Guarantee A Site Isn’t Fake
If a website does breach any of the following rules, stop and exit. However, these old rules no longer guarantee that a site is genuine.
- Poorly Designed Websites
- Spelling & Grammar Mistakes
- Padlock in The Browser
- Contact Page and Returns Policies
Poorly Designed Websites
In the old “wild-west” days of the internet, scam websites were easy to spot. Poor design and bad layout. Today, fake websites often look more professional than genuine sites!
Scammers know that the better the site looks, the more convincing it will be. They will invest time and money into designing a professional looking site. When the site get shutdown, they can easily migrate the site to a new domain and simply change the logo to match the new name.
Never complete a purchase online just because “the site looks good”.
Spelling & Grammar Mistakes Within the Content
If a website does look professionally laid out but is full of spelling & grammar mistakes then yes, you should question its validity.
This used to be down to overseas scammers publishing short-term fake sites without having someone that speaks that language natively check it for errors. Never complete a purchase purely on the back of not spotting any spelling mistakes!
Look For the Padlock in The Browser
Incorrect, misleading and dangerous advice to spot fake websites suggests that consumers should check for the padlock icon in the browser.
The security padlock in the browser shows that the website domain has a valid SSL certificate. It means that the site runs on https.
A padlock in the browser is absolutely no guarantee that the website isn’t fake.
Anyone can purchase a brand-new domain name and with the domain or hosting, comes a valid certificate that gives the site the security padlock.
There are no background checks done to make sure that the site is selling genuine products.
In fact, using OpenSSL you could even create your own certificate and issue it to yourself!
SSL certificates are issued instantly from hosting companies without any checks done on the address of the owner or whether they are genuine.
Let’s be clear here. The lock in the browser displays that the information sent and received between your browser and the network server are encrypted. This means the data cannot be intercepted between you and the site you are on. This is a good thing as you wouldn’t want to send credit card details over an unsecured connection. But that’s it. On fake sites the only guarantee is that you have a secure connection directly to the scammer.
Never treat the padlock as any sign that the site is genuine or reputable.
Contact Page and Returns Policies
Every reputable site should have a clearly listed address in their returns policy. The details within their contact page should include an address, telephone number and email address rather than purely an online contact form.
However, scammers know that consumers are looking for these things to determine if the site is real or fake.
If there is no customer support telephone number on the site, you probably wouldn’t want to deal with them anyway. If you are on an online shopping site and the only contact number is a mobile number, this may also suggest that the site isn’t genuine.
The address details can be faked. Again, the fact that a website has professional looking returns policy and contact page is no guarantee that the site is real.
1000’s Of Genuine Online Retailers
There are 1000’s of genuine online retailers out there. If they have failed to make the effort to make their online shopping site look and operate properly, find one that does.
Online shopping trends have changed in recent years. Increasingly, consumers are turning to sites like Amazon. Certainly these sites offer convenience and ease of use, but don’t always offer the best deals.
Some independent retailers are being forced to sell their goods on sites like Amazon but at a higher price because of commission rates and profits being squeezed.
The result – you pay more for the goods that you want to buy.
This is the result of scam websites casting worry and doubt in the public from buying online from genuine smaller retailers.
Shop online. Buy local. Buy from smaller independent sellers. But stay wise on how to spot fakes.
Better still, when you are happy with the goods or services that you bu from independent retailers online, take a few seconds to write them a good review on Trustpilot.