Why Scammers Impersonate Your Business

You've spent time and money to build your reputation. Internet criminals love that – the better their story, the easier it is to trick victims out of their money. Stealing your company's name gives them instant credibility, and because of that, they set up copycat websites.

Why let criminals profit from your effort, and at your expense? We will protect your good name by actively watching for fraudulent misuse. This isn't just a question of having some good software; we use our knowledge of how scammers work, to understand what they've done and to anticipate their next steps. Our experts are in constant contact with law enforcement, scam victims, and anti-fraud groups around the world: we know the newest trends as they happen, not weeks after a scam has been started.

Fraudulent websites are key parts of five main types of fraud.

Phishing

Phishing relies on making an exact copy of a company's site in order to fool visitors into entering their username, password, credit card, or other important information. The victim is lured to the site by spam messages, spoofed to appear to come from the real sender. Once they input their personal information, it is quickly exploited by phishers for identity theft, and either is converted directly to cash for the criminals, or used to fund other lucrative criminal enterprises (described below).

Job Scams

Organized crime profits greatly from phishing and identity theft, but only if they can access that money anonymously. To launder funds, they recruit unwitting "employees" to become money mules: receiving stolen funds and sending them overseas. Other criminal gangs use stolen credit cards to purchase small, expensive items (e.g., electronics, jewellery). These are shipped to an "employee" who forwards the packages overseas. Known as reshipping or postal forwarding scams, it is practised by a wide range of international criminals.

Legitimate businesses don't hire complete strangers in foreign countries, but victims eager for work-at-home positions don't know that. Websites for job scams tend to proliferate rapidly, changing domain names while keeping the same company identity.

Advance fee fraud

An old classic updated for the internet age, this scam convinces a victim that a large reward is waiting in return for little effort. It opens with an amazing story of money -- a lottery win, an inheritence, an overinvoiced contract -- waiting to be claimed. When a victim is hooked, the fraudster reveals fees that must be paid before the victim can access the fortune. This involves fraudulent websites posing as banks, security companies, lawyers, lotteries, couriers, even chemical companies. The sites are infrastructure; when the criminal has a story about millions of dollars, he shows victims an online bank account with a bulging balance, reinforcing his "honesty" to overcome any doubts.

If these copycat websites are not shut down quickly, they not only pose a danger to scam victims who might be further convinced through them that their "deal" is real, they also undermine the reputation of those whose trademark and copyright is abused.

Online auction and escrow fraud

Legitimate escrow sites companies serve as a third party agency between sellers and buyers trading through online auction sites. Organized crime has turned this transaction to their own profit. They create websites posing as legitimate escrow services, then set up sham transactions in which the victim is asked to use that service to pay for an item purchased online. By the time the victim realizes that they will not receive what they bought, it is already too late, and the money is gone.

Escrow fraud has grown into a huge industry during the last years, with thousands of fake sites set up each year and losses in the millions each year. These fraudulent sites not only threaten customers, they also infringe the copyright of legitimate escrow services and shipping companies. They do significant damage to the reputation, and business, of online auction sites.

Pirated and counterfeit products

"Selling" non-existant electronic goods is popular amongst the Nigerian internet criminal underground. Possible victims are targeted in several different ways, often through spam emails, but also on the various online auction sites. Such a scam gains a lot of credibility if the scammer can show his victims a "shop website" – after all, if a shop has a website, it must be real! Another version of this involves selling real goods that are counterfeit products; this is damaging to both the customers and to the targeted companies.

Whether "selling" something that does not exist at all or selling pirated goods, the most important red flags indicating fraud are considerably lower prices than the competition, and payment involving Western Union which makes the money trail nearly untraceable.