Who wouldn’t want to get a brand-new Apple iPhone as a present this holiday season? Who wouldn’t want to buy one as a gift for a loved one when that iPhone comes with a tempting 25% or more discount? The emotional and commercial mix that hits shoppers at this time of year is what scammers are relying upon to con buyers out of their credit card data or banking information as iPhone discount scams flood the marketplace, according to one leading security vendor. Here’s what you need to know.
Apple iPhone Scammers Flood The Internet With Fake Discounts
Security experts from McAfee have revealed to The Sun that an astonishing 77,980 websites supposedly selling iPhones and other Apple products at discounts ranging from 25% to 90% have been found online. Such brand impersonation attacks are a year-round security problem, but in the run-up to Dec. 25 they take on a whole new sense of urgency. “We expect [the increase] to continue through the festive season,” a McAfee spokesperson told the newspaper.
Brand Impersonation Scams Target More Than Just iPhone Buyers
Cybersecurity experts at Malwarebytes warned of similar brand impersonation scams ahead of Black Friday this year, “Where there’s a gift to be bought, there’s also a scammer out to make money,” Anna Brading, a director at Malwarebytes, said. McAfee also pointed out that, in addition to Apple, “Adidas, Yeezy, Louis Vuitton and Rolex are brand names frequently used by cybercrooks looking to scam consumers.”
Although it might be highly tempting, especially given the economic crisis many find themselves in this year, to try and snap up a bargain iPhone purchase with just a few days left to shop, that would be a huge and costly mistake. The thing that ties all these scam sites together is that they are after one thing: your money. They aim to get this by either taking your hard-earned cash in exchange for an iPhone that simply doesn’t exist or, and often also, taking your credit card or banking details and using them to take much larger sums.
Mitigating The 25% Off iPhone Discount Scams
While McAfee has suggested that the “most foolproof” way to determine if a site is the genuine Apple article or a scam is to look at the URL itself, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. The advice itself is sound in theory, but in practice, there are ways that cybercriminals are getting around such due diligence. Link-hovering attacks, for example, spoof the text that appears when you hover your mouse over a link to display the real URL. As I have recently warned, “All that is required is some simple HTML coding, nothing advanced about this at all, which edits the mouseover text label which is displayed next to the link being hovered over while the actual URL is displayed elsewhere.”
These iPhone discount scams are, at heart, nothing more than phishing attacks. Which means that all the usual advice regarding phishing mitigation methods stands. However, I would recommend you read this insightful article that spells out a new approach to dealing with such brand impersonation scams, iPhone or otherwise. If nothing else, it should give you some very timely food for thought.
