Beware of fake sites

According to the news published by 24 Kanal, based on the EclecticIQ report, cyber security researchers claim that a fraud group called SilkSpecter made fake promotions of popular brands on Black Friday in order to obtain information about the bank information of unsuspecting victims. This situation has been continuing since October.

SilkSpecter’s activities affect both the United States and all of Europe, so it could also affect Ukrainians. Ads for various products offer discounts of up to 80%.

Brands copied by scammers include well-known brands such as The North Face, Wayfair, LLLean, IKEA and others. Some sites do not focus on a specific brand, but simulate a full-fledged marketplace with a variety of companies. For example, one of the sites offers shoes.

• As a rule, all these fake sites are easily recognizable, because their addresses often refer to Black Friday or other unnecessary words and expressions. For example, the so-called North Face site looks like “northfaceblackfriday.shop” and the Wayfair site looks like wayfareblackfriday.com.
• Often the domain name of such sites may be “store” or “top”, but genuine sites almost always use the domain name “com”.
• Real official company websites have no extra words or phrases, just their name.
• Additionally, some resources have a green “Trusted store” label in one of the corners of the page to distract users, informing them that the site is supposedly safe.

Visiting such sites often triggers Meta and TikTok’s Internet tracking tools, which determine the user’s location and translate the page into their language to make it appear more authentic, the researchers write.

Phishing site impersonating North Face. You can see the “crooked” machine translation, big discounts and the “Trusted store” tag / 24 Channel Screenshot

Scammers are using the popular payment platform Stripe to collect information – just a copy of it, of course. However, once the card information is entered, all information is instantly sent to fraudsters..

EclecticIQ warns that some of the information collected may be used for further attacks on victims to compromise multi-factor authentication and compromise sensitive accounts. At the same time, your card data can be used immediately to withdraw your money.