Phishing Scams don’t have to be complicated

Today we are going to talk about a recent phishing scam to prove that anyone can not only fall for these scams but it doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to run them.

During the early days of the pandemic, a 17-year-old British teenager pulled off a phishing scam to net him millions in bitcoin. What he did was set up a fake online store to mimic an existing website.  He created an online site similar to love2shop an online gift card website. He then purchased google ads to drive traffic to his fake website.  He would then collect people’s credit card and Paypal information when they checked out on his site. He would collect the money and provide no gift cards.

He had stolen around 323,000 pounds and then he purchased bitcoin with them. These types of attacks don’t take a lot to set up and can go on for a long period of time before they are spotted. This scheme was eventually realized when people scammed on his site reached out to the actual love2shop support personnel. The moral of the story is to be mindful when clicking around the internet especially when making purchases.