Warning issued over card scam hitting Apple and PayPal
These sites are crafted to steal your payment information without delivering a product, often luring shoppers in through social media links, fake ads, or even top Google search results. Cybersecurity experts from the Silent Push say thousands of these fake storefronts are active, many operated by organized criminal groups based in China .
'Our team has found thousands of domains spoofing various payment and retail brands in connection to this campaign, including: PayPal , Apple, Wayfair, Lane Bryant, Brooks Brothers, Hermes, Omaha Steaks, Michael Kors, and many, many more peddling everything from luxury watches to garage doors,' they say. Cybercriminals have copied images, layouts, and text from real retailers to appear convincing, sometimes with only a single swapped letter in the web address.
They also use fake Google Pay or Apple Pay buttons , or logos for Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, to make the fraudulent checkouts more believable. Once users land on one of these sites, they're pressured with 'limited-time' deals and countdown timers, classic bait to rush purchases. The FBI warns that these scams are becoming more sophisticated, especially around peak shopping seasons.
'A site you're buying from should have HTTPS in the web address,' the agency said. That's a basic sign of a secure site; it encrypts data, so your payment details stay private. Silent Push was tipped off by Mexican journalist Ignacio Gómez Villaseñor, who discovered fake stores targeting Mexico's 'Hot Sale 2025,' a Black Friday-style event .
When shoppers search for a deal, they are more likely to land on a scam site first, like 'Wrangler jeans' or 'discount handbags.' Domains like harborfrieght.shop (a misspelled version of Harbor Freight) and portal.oemsaas.shop were among many found to be operating under this network.
As Gómez Villaseñor noted, 'This simulation is done to gain user trust and steal your information without raising immediate suspicion.' The scale of the scam is staggering. Despite efforts to take down many of these sites, thousands remain live as of June 2025, according to Silent Push. Traditional takedown methods are being overwhelmed by the sheer number of new scam domains popping up each week.
The consequences are costly. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), Americans lost $16.6 billion to internet scams in 2024, a 33 percent increase from the year before. That includes nearly 860,000 complaints, a dramatic rise from the early 2000s when the center averaged just 2,000 reports per month.
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