The jobbing criminal these days is far too sophisticated to be just running up and down the high street nicking purses or wallets from the public. Today’s master criminal in fact is busy setting up fake websites and email accounts so as to engage with Joe Public and gradually gain their trust to enable them to bamboozle the innocent with fraudulent sites that he will subscribe to and probably be lulled into buying unbelievably priced bargains. As the old saing goes – if it looks too good to be true, then it will be too good to be true. Not only will he fraudster be able to con direct funds out of a victim by selling non existent goods, he will ensure his site looks as genuine as he can so that a victim engages with it and starts providing very critical peronal data. Not only is it a major problem once the bad guys have the personal info – that is how the identity frauds arre purpetrated, some of the criminals also spread viruses whih are specifically designed to steal passwords and other very sensitive information.

The difficulty is knowing how to recognise a fake website. Some of the more general signs would be: normally high value items being offered at seriously low prices or ivestment products being offered with very much better returns than similarly styled items; The language contained in the sales blurb will be intentionally panic inducing – making it sound critical that you get on and order right away or else you’ll miss out on a bargain; demanding payment is by bank transfer instead of credit or debit card. Their domain name will be very similar to another well known URL but will differ in one tiny detail; the fake wbsite will have no security detail such as closed padlock logo in the search bar when the site opens up; another well known trick is not offering any returns policy or money back guarantee and their promotional images may well be of shoddy quality and there could well be gramatical and spelling errors that you would never epect to encounter in a legitimate website entry. Of course we have the proliferation of AI generated sites now which has opened up a whole new can of worm!