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The scammers are getting better and shoppers are increasingly falling for fake online selling sites as it becomes harder to tell what's real and what's not
New research by Avast Malware identifies nearly 80,000 counterfeit websites posing as genuine retailers that are targeting New Zealand shoppers of well-known brands like Pandora, Zara, Swatch and H&M.
Netsafe's chief online safety officer Sean Lyons says these sites are set up with one purpose - to make people part with their hard-earned money.
"The numbers are really quite significant ... we did some research last year and the year before with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and they've estimated it could be over $2 billion worth of loss to New Zealanders," he says.
But according to Jessica Walker, acting head of research and advocacy at Consumer NZ, that figure could be even higher.
"There is no central repository gathering this information, so we know what the big financial institutions are being told but that's only based on what's being reported to them, so we think the figure is likely to be staggeringly high."
Walker would like to see New Zealand follow Australia and centralise all the work being done in this area.
"Having that one stop shop would make such a difference. It's really hard to know where to go and especially when you have a near miss," she says.
"People don't have the time to go looking for where to report it, so they don't, which means more and more people are at risk of being harmed."
Scammers can strike at any time of the year, but they really up their game during certain holiday periods.
"There's definitely a boost around any time when people are shopping more, so Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there is probably an increase in the number of reports we see and then there's probably an increase in the proliferation of these sites themselves," Lyons says.
He adds that scammers rely on people being more rushed and eager to make purchases, because they are less likely to take the time to properly check a website's credibility.
With the evolution of technology, it is becoming easier for scammers to scam, and harder for customers to see red flags.
"[The scammers] are putting a lot of time and effort into creating these scams, but they're putting a lot of time and effort in because they are profitable endeavours," Lyons says.
One green flag many Kiwis look for when checking a website's legitimacy is a .nz domain name.
But Domain Name Commissioner Barbara Pearse says that is not necessarily a good marker. It does not even guarantee the website is being operated in New Zealand.
"To have a .nz domain name, you don't have to be located in New Zealand or be a New Zealand business, they're available globally," she explains.
While online scams occur in less than 1 percent of websites in the .nz domain, Pearse says it is still important to check a site's credibility in other ways.
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