SCAMMAGNIFIER: Piercing the Veil of Fraudulent Shopping Website Campaigns

In an evolving digital environment under perpetual threat from cybercriminals, phishing remains a predominant concern. However, there is a shift towards fraudulent shopping websites---fraudulent websites offering bogus products or services while mirroring the user experience of legitimate shopping websites. A key open question is how important fraudulent shopping websites in the cybercrime ecosystem are?

This study introduces a novel approach to detecting and analyzing fraudulent shopping websites through large-scale analysis and collaboration with industry partners. We present ScamMagnifier, a framework that collected and analyzed 1,155,237 shopping domains from May 2023 to June 2024, identifying 46,746 fraudulent websites. Our automated checkout process completed 41,863 transactions, revealing 5,278 merchant IDs associated with these scams. The collaborative investigations with one of major financial institutions also confirmed our findings and provided additional insights, linking 14,394 domains to these fraudulent merchants. In addition, we introduce a Chromium web extension to alert users of potential fraudulent shopping websites. This study contributes to a better understanding of e-Commerce fraud and provides valuable insights for developing more effective defenses against these evolving threats.