Scams: Fake sales sites becoming more intricate and targeting all ages

An estimated $2.3 billion was lost in New Zealand in the year to August 30, 2024. Photo / 123rf

Online scams are becoming increasingly hard to spot and it is not just older people falling for them.

An estimated $2.3 billion was lost in New Zealand in the year to August 30, 2024 - up from $2b the year before. Netsafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons told the Whanganui Chronicle fake retail websites were now “intricate, exact, indistinguishable copies”.

“The logo being off a little bit, the written language being a bit poor, spelling mistakes, those things are heading towards redundant red flags,” he said.

“It’s just so easy for the people that want to fool us to make those changes.” Lyons said cloning images had also become easier and using bots - software applications programmed to complete automated tasks - was one way to do that.

“These bots are probably out there to be used for legitimate purposes but people can find a way around safeguards,” he said. “There are a million and one different tricks compared to where we were a few years ago.” Lyons said the only difference could be a slight modification to a URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web address).

“Even then, an ‘r‘ and an ’n’ next to each other can look like an ‘m’. “There are ways to make zeros look like [the letter O] and vice versa, so it gets to the point where you have to be so precise.”

Sean Lyons says people "just need to be hit by the right hook at the right time" to be scammed.

Lyons said scams were not just “an $100,000 product for $1″ and fake items could be advertised for the expected amount or more.

“If a dozen people hit the button [scammers] have made a lot of money - for very little cost upfront.”

Data compiled by Netsafe and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance showed around half of online scans in New Zealand in the year to August 2024 happened to people aged between 18 and 44.

Online shopping scams overtook identity theft as the biggest cause of losses.

“From the scammers’ point of view, there is a whole market out there of people who are savvy, who are trading online, who are regularly into commerce,” Lyons said. “You don’t need to be new to something to fall for these things. You just need to be hit by the right hook at the right time.”

He said investment scams had faked endorsements from prolific Instagram influencers. “They are not targeting our parents and grandparents, they are targeting young people.”

Lyons said Netsafe had a URL checker - checknetsafe.nz - where people could enter a web address and get an appraisal from a number of different databases.

“A good old fashioned check is talking to someone who is not quite as emotionally invested in whatever the product is - having an objective second look,” he said. “We’ve all got to be on guard and when in doubt, talk to us. That’s what Netsafe is there for.”

Comment: What happened to me

Chronicle reporter Mike Tweed shares his personal experience of being scammed.

For weeks, I had been looking for a particular pair of shoes but to no avail. It seemed there were none available in the country until they appeared in the exact size and colour I was after, and from what looked to be the brand’s New Zealand site.

A (slightly uneducated) site check did not turn up anything suspicious and the shoes were not heavily discounted. Everything seemed legitimate, right down to the transaction, and it was only after the shoes did not turn up that I had a closer look.

It turns out the brand does not have a New Zealand site.

What did I not do? Run the URL through a scam detection tool. Lesson learned.

Mike Tweed is a multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present his focus is local government, primarily the Whanganui District Council.