Criminals have been plotting for months. The traps are laid, the snares are set, and now all they have to wait for are the clicks.
We are still days away from the busiest shopping day of the year, but fraudulent deals, phishing attacks and fake websites are already plaguing the internet as scammers look to capitalise on the sales frenzy that is Black Friday.
Cyber security professionals are increasingly referring to it as 'Black Fraud Day' due to the growing number of people falling victim to scams. Attacks can come in many forms: fake delivery texts with dodgy links, unsolicited emails offering too-good-to-be-true deals, and bogus online adverts leading to copycat websites of popular retailers.
My own inbox has been filling up with dozens of emails about the sharp rise in criminal activity surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which fall on 28 November and 1 December.
Phishing emails targeting Black Friday shoppers are up more than 620 per cent, according to security platform Darktrace, while NordVPN tells me that fake Amazon storefronts have surged by more than 200 per cent in recent days, and fraudulent eBay sites have shot up by more than 500 per cent.
These fake shops are designed to steal people's credit card details, or even their entire online identity, by mimicking trusted sellers. Developed using new AI tools, they can be difficult to distinguish from the real thing.
"Many of these sites are almost indistinguishable from the real thing," someone from NordVPN told me, adding that "convincing checkout pages are designed solely to harvest personal and payment information."
Malicious links embedded in emails and sponsored ads are also on the rise, leading shoppers to scam stores. According to a recent survey of more than 30,000 people from 185 countries, the majority of people (68 per cent) are unable to identify a fake website.
The advice from security experts is to double-check URLs, be skeptical of emails and texts purporting to be from vendors or delivery services, avoid shopping on public WiFi, and to monitor bank transactions.
Another trick can come from the retailers themselves, who jack up the prices in the weeks leading up to Black Friday in order to offer artificial discounts when the day arrives. One way to check such sales is through price tracker sites like PriceLasso or CamelCamelCamel, which allow you to check the price history of a product to see if it's actually a good deal.
There are of course plenty of good deals (the best one picked out by our shopping expert was a four-pack of Apple AirTags for £74). But if you're hunting for a bargain this week, just beware.
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