A Greytown business owner has described her horror at discovering a fake online store posing as her shop and advertising the same products with impossibly low prices.
Lorraine Hall, who owns Hall Concept Store, said she discovered the copycat website in December when conducting an image search for a product’s market research.
“I could see that we and some other stores were pricing this product at around $60 which made sense,” Hall said.
“Then I saw another shop was listing it for $25, so I thought that was strange
and clicked the link.”
At that point, Hall couldn’t believe her eyes because the website she was looking at said Hall NZ.
“I thought maybe my website had a virus or something, my eyes weren’t quite confirming what I was seeing,” Hall said.
“Everything – all my product – was copied and pasted on
a different platform.”
The quality and number of counterfeit stores created by scammers have levelled up recently, according to security company Avast, which noted that high-fashion boutique brands were a common target.
As an independent business owner, Hall selects all her products individually and said that the duplicate store had used a mix of her images, images supplied by her supplier and product descriptions from her website.
While Hall’s website domain name is hallnz.co.nz, the fake website had registered under hallnz.shop. When clicking any contact links on the fraudulent site, she said it would just refresh back to the site’s homepage, a pattern commonly observed in fake sites to avoid having a physical or digital contact address listed.
“I was just horrified because what damage is this doing to our business and how many customers have been scammed?” Hall asked.
“Lucky I haven’t had anyone come back to me yet.”
Due to the “ridiculously low” prices being listed by the fraudulent site, Hall said she was worried people might be sucked in.
She said she reported it to the police but was told that unless someone bought a product from the fake site and then reported it, there was little they could do.
Hall also notified the government companies register, which identified two platforms hosting the site.
A spokesperson for New Zealand’s Computer Emergency Response Team [CERT NZ] said fake shopping sites were one of the more common ways to try and steal money from people.
“For the business owners they impersonate this is incredibly frustrating, and in some cases, heart-breaking.”
Usually, scammers would recreate pages on Facebook or other social media platforms, but the spokesperson noted that building a fake website could be just as easy.
They said while a website takes longer to build, it’s harder to detect and there’s no central platform for reporting the fraud.
“Small business owners don’t have time to constantly search for these fakes, and so by the time they’ve been spotted, the damage to a business’s reputation can already be done.”
CERT NZ director Rob Pope said resources were available for business owners concerned about fraud.
“Running a business requires a lot of skills and cyber security isn’t on a lot of people’s radar when they start out,” Pope said.
“CERT NZ can offer advice and assistance when you need it.”
CERT NZ advice when dealing with a fraudulent website includes:
Reporting the site to CERT NZ, the government’s cyber security agency for small to medium businesses and individuals. CERT NZ has existing relationships with online hosting providers and can work to have the sites taken offline.
If the site is hosted on a social media platform, also report it to that platform.
Inform your customers that the site is fraudulent and to avoid it. This can be done via any channel you would normally use to communicate with people. You may also want to tell them to immediately report to their bank and the police if they have sent money to the scammers through the fake site.
If you’re worried about someone potentially stealing images from your site to use on a fake version, you can watermark your product images with your real web address.
