Online shopping syndicate warning in South Africa

A Chinese syndicate has scammed over 850,000 people worldwide using bogus websites that closely resemble the real brand.

Speaking to 702, business strategist and founder of Cherry Flava Media, Jon Cherry, said he had fallen victim to such a scam and highlighted some of the red flags to look out for.

Cherry said he attempted to purchase “fashionable gear” from a site that appeared to be legitimate.

“It was incredibly deceptive because it looked exactly like the brand that I was hoping to buy some gear from,” said Cherry.

What should’ve alarmed me is that most things were on special, none of the social media links worked, and it just sounded too good to be true.”

He explained that after he entered his payment details and submitted the payment, he experienced a sinking feeling that something was wrong.

“It was at that moment that I went on to some other sites just to cross-check whether, in fact, this was a legitimate site, and to my horror, I found that it, in fact, was a scam site,” said Cherry.

He added that the payment notification showed that the payment went to a store in Hong Kong called The Cam Hub Store, after which he found numerous scam articles about the store on Reddit.

“The main flags were that everything was on sale. Understandably, the brand that I was on is a well-known luxury brand, and it would be unlikely that these items would be on sale,” said Cherry.

Cherry said he identified another scam site on Wednesday, 13 November 2024, impersonating the popular Canadian brand Lululemon.

The site, Lululemon South Africa Stores, also listed most items as being on sale.

“I cross-checked it with Lululemon.com, and I could see the images used were obviously old images,” said Cherry.

“That’s their modus operandi. They go into The Wayback Machine and scrape an old version of the legitimate site, and they upload that onto a dormant domain that perhaps used to belong to that brand.”

“It’s an incredibly sophisticated modus operandi that they use, and there are thousands of these websites,” he added.

He said his research shows that this syndicate has scammed more than 850,000 people globally.

When asked about using scam-checking sites like Scam-Detector.com’s Validator, Cherry said they can be effective but warned that he believes scammers could soon game those systems too.

“The backend that powers these scam sites is produced by a Chinese syndicate that then licences that backend to other criminals in the network,” he said.

“I would say within the next couple of months, you would probably find that scammers are able to infiltrate some of those checking sites.”

In August 2024, the Consumer Goods and Services Ombudsman (CGSO) warned that South African consumers are vulnerable to online shopping scams and fake websites.

“E-commerce has become a great part of what we do, but with it comes a lot of risks,” said CGSO Ombud Lee Soobrathi.

“We know how prevalent fraud is. We know how easy it is for someone to get your credentials online.”

He explained that the best form of protection against these risks is to be proactive.

“You have to do your homework and understand who you are contracting with,” said Soobrathi.

“With the advent of e-commerce and digitisation, the risks are going to come from rogue entities.”

He said the CGSO issues consumer alerts about rogue websites and suppliers to warn customers about staying away from these sites. All alerts are available on the CGSO website.

“If you are on a website and anything seems uncertain, if a URL, for example, has a 3 instead of an ‘E’ or an ‘I’ instead of an ‘L’, these are the minor things that one needs to look out for,” said Soobrathi.

“Make sure you do your best to protect yourself, and while we can’t 100% avoid these fraudulent websites, the proactive approach is best, and if you get an inkling that something is wrong, we would suggest staying away from it and not transacting at all.”