The Evolution of Scam Websites: From Data Theft to the Sale of Counterfeit Products

The evolution of scam websites clearly illustrates how the landscape of online fraud targeting Italian consumers has changed in recent years. These are no longer just slapdash websites, with grammatical errors and suspicious domain names, easily recognizable at first glance. Today, those who create scam websites work meticulously, copying real data from existing companies and even going so far as to ship physical goods, all to appear credible right up to the final step of the purchase.

A prime example is the website vogliadipiscine.com, which in its privacy policy even included the details of Logista Italia S.p.A., a company that is completely unrelated to the management of the portal. This type of tactic is not random: including real, seemingly consistent, and verifiable company information serves to bypass the superficial checks that an attentive consumer might perform—such as a quick search of the VAT number or the company name listed in the site’s legal documents.

Buyers find a company that actually exists, with a history and an established presence, and let their guard down. In this specific case, Logista Italia itself was completely unaware of the unauthorized use of its identity: it was our association that contacted the company to report what had happened and enable it to file a complaint. A necessary step, but one that in practice rarely leads to concrete results, because identifying who is hiding behind these sites remains extremely difficult: domains registered under straw names or abroad, anonymous hosting, and fictitious corporate structures make scammers virtually untraceable, and the complaints, however necessary from a formal standpoint, almost always get stuck at this stage.

The case of buonanotte.boutique (by way of example)

This follows a similar pattern but with an even more disturbing twist: the site uses data traceable to a company that, precisely because of this misappropriation of its identity, has already filed a lawsuit against unknown parties.

This means that the actual company not only has no connection to the site in question, but is itself a victim, seeing its name and data used to deceive third parties. This scheme causes twofold damage: the economic and psychological damage suffered by the consumer who pays for a product that never arrived or arrived differently than promised, and the reputational damage suffered by the company that finds itself associated, through no fault of its own, with a scam.

Both websites, moreover, currently appear on ShopSicuro’s public blacklist with a reliability score of 20 out of 100, confirming that these are cases already identified and classified as fraudulent.

The next step in this evolution concerns the phase of delivery

For years, the most reliable red flag for identifying a fraudulent site was precisely the total absence of shipping: you’d pay, and nothing would arrive. The most sophisticated criminal organizations have realized that this behavior is too risky, because it immediately generates reports, negative reviews, and bank disputes over non-delivery. The

The solution was to change tactics: actually shipping something, but a different product—one of significantly lower quality than what was advertised, or lacking the stated technical specifications.

The Case of SSDs

The case of SSDs is particularly instructive on this point. Several consumers have reported purchasing solid-state drives advertised with high capacities, only to discover, once connected to a computer or tested with diagnostic software, that the actual capacity declared by the firmware was false: the device showed the operating system a much larger amount of available space than was physically present on the memory chips, with the result that, once a certain write threshold was exceeded, the device would fail. reported by the firmware was false: the device showed the operating system much more available space than was physically present on the memory chips, with the result that, once a certain write threshold was exceeded, the data was either overwritten or corrupted.

The buyer therefore receives a physical, tangible item that seems to work at first, and this makes the scam much more difficult to challenge than a simple failure to deliver: the package has arrived, the product exists, and the problem only emerges later, when the customer has already exceeded the standard return period.

This development makes the work of those involved in consumer protection increasingly complex, because traditional risk indicators are no longer sufficient. A recently registered domain, a well-designed grafic layout, company information that appears correct upon initial verification, and even a package that arrives on time are no longer sufficient guarantees. A more in-depth level of analysis is needed, one capable of cross-referencing information that a consumer, on their own, is unlikely to have the time or tools to verify.

SHOPSICURO.IT, dedicated to consumer protection, combines automated analysis with manual analysis.

It is in this context that a tool like ShopSicuro plays a significant role. Its strength lies in combining automated checks— useful for quickly detecting standard red flags such as suspicious domains, technical inconsistencies, or known fraud patterns—with manual checks, which are indispensable in the most sophisticated cases, such as those described above.

Thanks to these reports, our experts go beyond the algorithm.

A purely automated analysis, however advanced, is unlikely to recognize that the company data listed in a privacy policy actually belongs to a company unrelated to the website, or that an SSD specification sheet lists a memory capacity that is inconsistent with the chip actually installed: these are assessments that require targeted human analysis, capable of cross-referencing different sources and identify inconsistencies that escape an algorithm.

This combination of the speed of automated checks and the depth of manual checks is what makes it possible to identify scams that would otherwise remain invisible until the damage is done.

The data collected by the project provides a measure of the phenomenon.

To date—and SHOPSICURO was published in early June—there have been over 8,300 verifications in total, with more than 3,200 sites analyzed individually, over 3,500 insurance checks, 40 contract analyses, and approximately 1,560 phone numbers checked: an effort that has led to the identification of over 100 confirmed scams and more than 280 reports submitted by users.

The public blacklist (https://www.shopsicuro.it/blacklist-pubblica) currently lists 108 sites already confirmed as fraudulent, a list that is updated daily and includes, along with the two cases already mentioned, dozens of other portals with very low reliability scores: non-existent furniture stores, fashion boutiques that never existed, and sites that present themselves as nearly identical clones of other already-reported portals, with the sole difference being the domain name.

In some cases, however, the score remains in the highest risk range even when the site is graphically well-designed, precisely because it is the manual review that identifies the inconsistencies that make a site a full-fledged scam.

For consumers, the practical message is that caution can no longer stop at the surface of the website. Verify the consistency between the seller’s name and the legal information provided, be wary of prices that are too aggressive compared to the market, check reviews across multiple independent sources, and, whenever possible, rely on tools that combine technical and human verification—these remain the strongest defenses against a phenomenon that continues to evolve faster than many imagine.