01 November 2021  —  Eric Swotinsky
Incident reports

Thousands fall victim to fraudulent gift card website

A British teen earned more than $2.7 million with a fraudulent replica of the popular Love2Shop gift card online shop.

After creating the phishing website, the teen was able to collect all payment card details and other private data entered by users who were attempting to purchase gift cards. Victims never received these cards.

Law enforcement found details of 12,000 payment cards and around 200 PayPal accounts in the teen's possession. The teen earned $440,000 from the website within a few weeks in 2020, which he then invested in Bitcoin and grew to a value of around $3 million.

The URL filtering in Acronis Cyber Protect prevents users from accessing fake or fraudulent websites, eliminating the risk of falling for phishing scams like this one.