Home Page Navigation Contents Contact Sitemap Search

Fake shops

“Und Sie? Hätten Sie ja gesagt?” (And you? Would you have said yes?”) is the cur­rent national cam­paign run by the Schweiz­erische Polizeikorps and the Schweiz­erische Krim­i­nal­präven­tion (SKP) on the sub­ject of fake shops. Find out how you can avoid falling victim to such machinations.

This cam­paign is meant to alert you to dan­gers in con­nec­tion with the pur­chase of goods from online mar­ket­places. Some of these mar­ket­places are cre­ated with the sole pur­pose of deceiving buyers. We are talking about faked online shops here, often tempting buyers with very attrac­tive prices for par­tic­u­larly pop­ular prod­ucts. How­ever, such goods don’t actu­ally exist. Internet users placing an order in such shops will there­fore never receive the goods they pur­chased, or will receive only defec­tive or faked goods at best.

It is also impor­tant to note that fraud­sters often employ this scam to cap­ture per­sonal data their vic­tims have poten­tially pro­vided to them – with the aim of abusing their vic­tims’ iden­tity for fur­ther crim­inal offences later.

 

David’s story (shown in the video clip) is a good example of how such a scam works. He thought he had hit the jackpot and found a unique offer for an item he wanted to give to his daughter. In the even, he fell victim to a fraud. Although he had bought a games con­sole at a great dis­count on the orig­inal price, his daughter will never receive this present, and he won’t ever get his money back.

This video clip is meant to demon­strate gen­eral advice pro­vided by the cam­paign as to how to behave cor­rectly when buying on the Internet; ide­ally to pre­vent anyone becoming a victim of cyber fraud:

  • Beware of offers which look too good to be true.
  • Only shop at trust­worthy online shops and find out about any com­pany before you buy from them. For instance, are T&Cs listed, and is there an option to con­tact them by phone? You should also have a look at the other buyers’ opin­ions and recommendations.
  • Ensure that the Internet page you are buying from is secure before you enter your per­sonal data such as pass­words and pay­ment details (such as credit card details).
  • If at all pos­sible, always order your goods on account and don’t pay in advance. Oth­er­wise there is a risk that you never receive your goods and lose your money.

What else would you like to learn about security when e-banking?

Reg­ister for a course now
and learn more:

Basic course

Find out about cur­rent Internet threats and some easy pro­tec­tive mea­sures, and how to securely use e-banking.

fur­ther information

Online course mobile banking/payments

Find out about mobile banking, mobile pay­ments and how to securely use these apps.

fur­ther information

Online course for the under-30s

Learn how to use your smart­phone securely. Next to basics, we will show you what you should know about social media, clouds, mobile banking and mobile payments.

fur­ther information

Course for SMEs

Is your organ­i­sa­tion suf­fi­ciently secure? Learn which mea­sures you can take to sig­nif­i­cantly strengthen your organisation’s IT security.

fur­ther information