What do Europeans, Americans and Australians have in common? Scammed $50M by fake e-stores A crime ring dubbed BogusBazaar has scammed 850,000 people out of tens of millions of dollars via a network of dodgy shopping websites. Victims in Western Europe, Australia, and America were tricked by these sham sites into placing orders for goods that either didn't exist or were cheap knock-offs, and had their credit card …
No more deleting posts saying that Cloudflare is serving organized crime. You've just reported it yourself.
Given how many times the organized crime connection has been reported, and given how long these fake store toolkits have been on Cloudflare, it would be difficult to argue that it's not intentional by Cloudflare.
There's a line between saying an internet provider is being used by criminals and an internet provider is actively involved in a crime. If any comments have been moderated in the past, it's possibly because a line was crossed and flagged in a way we couldn't ignore legally.
Pretty much every internet platform gets used for wrong at some point.
C.
I know anything can be abused - I'm a software developer of Internet applications and services. I've had battles with legitimate services being abused in constantly adapting ways. Sometimes features had to be cut.
What I'm talking about is the action. Is there an investigation of abuse complaints? Are any steps taken to reduce future abuse? I haven't seen any of that from Cloudflare. They are not be the worst but, unlike other networks, they are in a position of power where people can't firewall and forget their entire address space. Their public DNS is even a clever means of evading hostname blocks.
fake online stores spanning 22,500 domains
I believe it. I've been looking for some spare parts to suit a bicycle brand that recently ceased to exist. So far the only online stores I've been able to find listing the parts are scams. Some of them even post-date the bankruptcy.
Fortunately it's easy to pick the scam sites because always seem to be selling $1,000+ wheelsets for $9x.xx and $5,000+ bikes for $29x.xx. So they're designed to rope in idiots rather than deceive normal consumers.
Not always. Some of them are smart enough to offer brand name clothing at 10% or so below the genuine price. Unfortunately that works much better since, well, it seems plausible. Fortunately (a) it wasn't that much money and (b) we worked out that it was a scam [see icon] and cancelled the credit card in time. But all we got was a pair of cheap sunglasses, genuinely made in China. Why some of the sites send these consolation prizes isn't clear.
>Why some of the sites send these consolation prizes isn't clear.
Harder to get a credit card / PayPal chargeback for 'wrong item' vs not delivered and no tracking?
Credit cards and even legit cheap tat stores like AliExpress will normally refund without question if tracking is wrong or missing
Some of them are smart enough to offer brand name clothing at 10% or so below the genuine price
Yup. SWMBO was taken to a fake Cath Kidston site that pretended to offer a sale on clothes (-30%, -40%). The order didn't go through, so no consolation items, but a few days later a purchase attempt was flagged and blocked by Amex. The scammers had taken advantage from the fact that the official website had been closed (the business is now operated by Next) and set up a copycat that appeared high in the search results.
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