New Research Reveals Fake Stores Using LLMs to Generate Text for Product Listings During Holiday Season

With Cyber Week (running from Black Friday to Cyber Monday) just around the corner, online stores are offering significant discounts to entice consumers to buy products from their online stores. While legitimate brands provide great offers, some discounts are an indication of more malevolent activity—fraudulent online stores. In 2023, there was a 135% increase in fake online stores leading up to the holidays and has continued through 2024.

Netcraft has released its latest blog, exploring the company’s research into the global growth of fake stores, including activity that makes use of e-commerce platform, SHOPYY to target Black Friday shoppers.

SHOPYY is a Chinese e-commerce platform offering a broad portfolio of technical solutions to help retailers build and optimize online stores, promote products, and accept different payment types. SHOPYY also provides hosting and domain registration on behalf of store operators.

While some legitimate businesses use SHOPYY, Netcraft research has detected thousands of SHOPYY-powered fake stores and the Use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate text for product listings.

Highlights of the research include:

  • An increase of 110% in fake stores identified between August and October 2024
  • 20% more fake stores in November this year than in November 2023
  • Tens of thousands of fake stores utilizing e-commerce tech platform SHOPYY
  • More than 66% of SHOPYY-powered sites identified as fake stores

You can read the research here.

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