Fake-shop network targets small businesses and consumers

A network of more than 119,000 fake online shops has copied websites belonging to about 40,000 businesses, including many small companies, BR reports. Munich IT entrepreneur Benedikt Scheungraber, whose company investigates online fraud, says it is the largest such network identified so far.

Among the businesses affected is Kuchentratsch, a social bakery in western Munich. Its website, used to take orders for cakes, has been copied four times. The copies use the bakery’s images, text and logo. Julia Höflinger, who helps manage its online presence, said she had not expected a small business like theirs to be targeted.

Scheungraber found the network after his company was asked to remove a fake shop. By the third or fourth case, he noticed that the sites shared the same hosting provider, domain registrar and servers. He then used AI assistants to analyse the network, finding shops in more than 40 languages.

BR reporters found more than half a dozen businesses in Bavaria whose online shops had been copied, including a jeweller, a brewery and a furniture maker. The fake pages often list the real businesses’ contact details and closely resemble their websites. Signs of fraud include prices in dollars, poor loading on desktop computers, web addresses ending in “.shop” and discounts of 60 to 70 percent.

Thomas Goger, a senior prosecutor at the Bavarian Central Office for Cybercrime, said the scale and quality of the sites were new, and that criminals operate them fully or partly automatically. Investigators also use AI to analyse websites, but Goger said the groups’ cross-border operations pose legal challenges because German authorities’ powers end at the country’s borders.

Cybersecurity law professor Dennis-Kenji Kipker of the University of Bremen described the trend as concerning, saying fake shops were becoming more numerous and more professionally designed. Scheungraber calls the network “DoppelCart”. He said customers who order from the fake sites pay for goods that never arrive.