GenAI used to create fake shopping sites ahead of Black Friday

The CyberWire Daily Briefing reports that fake shopping sites surged 110% from August through October, 2024. This surge in scam sites included "9,000 new and unique fake store domains hosted on SHOPYY between November 18th-21st." These sites are targeting holiday shoppers in the U.S. Researchers noted that generative AI, or GenAI, was used to create product descriptions and other content for these sites.

One of our email protection experts published an article on Black Friday scams last week. You can read it here: Black Friday cybersecurity alert: Protecting your wallet and data. We also have a blog post on how cybercriminals use GenAI for content localization, which can make it harder to spot content created by a scammer who is using an online translation service to write fake product descriptions or phishing attacks. You can read that article here: 5 Ways cybercriminals are using AI: Content localization.

You can shop securely online, but you should be aware of what site you are on and ensure it is the correct domain. Don't shop while on public wifi, and make sure those deals that are too good to be true are actually real. They're probably not. We have more tips on secure shopping in the Black Friday blog here.

For some examples of epic translation fails in big retail, check out this post by Lexigo: Lost in Translation: 16 of the Biggest Translation Fails.