In Russia, the number of fake sites with "foreign" brands has increased five times

The number of such resources has more than quintupled — by 579% compared to the same period in 2021.

According to Kommersant , scammers use more than 2,100 global brands and trademarks to attract attention.

Attackers act on behalf of companies from the field of online retail, telecommunications, services, banking and others.

On a global scale, the loss of legal business from the actions of copycat fraudsters is estimated by Group-IB experts at $80 million (5.9 billion rubles) per month, according to Forbes .

To increase their income, scammers use schemes with fake virtual payment cards in the AppStore and PlayStation Store. The attackers also paid attention to the purchase of access to Spotify Premium and Pornhub services, as well as the goods of IKEA, which left the Russian market.

In the first place among the imitators were fraudulent sites with an offer to buy paper during a period of its acute shortage and a sharp increase in prices.

The main victims of fraudsters are representatives of small and medium-sized businesses.

The success of fraudsters is based on the fact that consumers are used to certain brands and painfully perceive their departure from the Russian market. Perhaps the scope of action is even wider than experts report. The fact is that many victims of online fraud are silent about the fact that they were deceived and do not go anywhere with complaints.

As noted in Roskomnadzor, in the first half of the year, 4,100 fraudulent resources were removed and blocked.

However, it has not yet been possible to completely eradicate the problem: attackers are actively creating new resources to replace the liquidated ones. The main goal of brand imitators is enrichment.

In order not to become victims of intruders, Russians are advised to carefully study the work of resources before transferring money there. It is better to sell your products through long-established and well-established marketplaces, and not through newly opened platforms, the quality of which is not known.