Amazon’s annual Prime Day event is one of the most profitable days for Amazon, together with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season.
At the same time, it’s one of the most opportune moments for criminals to dupe consumers into visiting fake sites, which can look nearly identical to the real ones. Fraudsters can even use Google Ads to rank well in Google searches.
According to data presented by Atlas VPN, Amazon is the most impersonated retail brand in phishing websites, with over 1 633 suspicious sites detected in the last 90 days.
Notably, some of those sites have already been taken down, either by scammers themselves or by various security measures. However, as of 12 July, as many as 897 websites are still live.
The data for the research was extracted from CheckPhish, a phishing and fraud site scanner, which uses deep learning, computer vision, and NLP to simulate how a person would examine, comprehend, and reach a verdict on a suspicious website.
The next most-imitated retail brand is Walmart, with 427 phishing sites detected in the last 90 days, out of which 109 were still up and running on12 July.
Alibaba, one of the largest e-commerce companies globally, is the third most mimicked brand in phishing websites, with 398 detections in the last 90 days, out of which nearly half – 174 are still live.