It’s incredibly easy to sell something online. You can sign up with Shopify or a similar platform and get a site online in minutes. You can integrate a shopping cart into an existing WordPress site with WooCommerce. Site builder platforms such as Squarespace and Wix have shopping tools, too.
If you’re a dropshipper, you don’t need to develop or manufacture anything. If you have a logo or design you can use a third party to ship on demand.
Not coincidentally, ecommerce is a huge engine of fraud and scams. This includes non-delivery scams, fake local businesses, bait and switch product scams, and credit cards harvesting operations, to name just a few.
But beyond threat actors, the widespread use of online stores means that it’s yet another avenue to dig into when conducting due diligence and digital backgrounding on a business or person, and if you’re trying to identify the person or entity behind an online property or operation.
One challenge for investigators is that ecommerce sites often use the same templates and may clone or steal images, design, and code from other sites. This, combined with the use of private domain registrations, reduces the opportunities for identifying unique indicators that can be used to uncover ownership and connections.
Another challenge is that it's relatively trivial for a scammer to launch dozens or more stores and to keep cycling through domains and sites. Such large-scale scam or fraud operations can scale quickly and often exploit the lax oversight of ad platforms to drive customer traffic.
“With the widespread usage of content management systems (CMS), where CMS and shopping carts are often bundled together with a content delivery network (CDN) by a web host, bad actors can deploy e-commerce sites in a record fashion,” noted a report from FortiGuard Labs in 2021.
Things have only gotten more challenging. But there are options and bright spots. This guide offers a detailed look at approaches for analyzing ecommerce sites, including the two biggest store platforms, highlights more than half a dozen tools, and breaks down the indicators of ecommerce scam sites.
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