THE SCAM

You spot a store you don't recognize selling a brand you know at 65% off. The site looks sharp — real product photos, the brand's logo, customer reviews. It looks exactly like the company's official store, because much of it was copied straight from it.

It's not the company's store. Cybersecurity researchers at Nebty found about 119,000 fake online shops tied to one operation, called DoppelCart, impersonating more than 44,000 real brands. When you check out, hidden code on the page grabs your payment details — and can even steal the one-time verification code your bank sends you — relaying them to the scammers in real time.

THE RED FLAG

A deal that beats every real store by a mile is the lure, and the polished look is the trap. The days of scam websites looking thrown together are over: some of these fake shops load images directly from the real company's servers, so nothing on the page screams "scam."

The red flag is the store itself being unfamiliar. And the sneakiest part: a verification code from your bank is no longer a safe box to fill in — these sites can ask for it and pass it straight to the attacker while you're still sitting on the checkout page.

THE RULE

Before you buy from a store you've never heard of, check the address in your browser bar — a fake site uses a recognizable brand name inside a totally different domain. Search the store's name plus "scam" on your own, and pay with a credit card, which gives you a shot at getting the money back.

Read your bank's verification message before you type in any code. If the merchant or transaction looks unfamiliar, don't enter it — close the tab and call the number on the back of your card instead.

Read tonight's edition online: https://erawaeb.com/digest/daily/006-the-119-000-fake-stores-stealing-card-details/

(Source: Fox News / CyberGuy, reporting on Nebty research, September 2026)