It’s always a time for a bargain, but what happens when a sale is too good? You might be staring down the barrel of a ghost store.
We all love a ghost story, but what about a ghost store? That’s something most of us are going to grow to groan at, as scammers and cybercriminals find yet one more way to take hard-earned money from our wallets.
It’s not just another online scam you need to look out for; no, ghost stores go beyond the regular email phishing and SMS phishing known as “smishing” to surface what seems like a real online shop presence, but is anything but.
You’ll hear a lot about ghost stores during sale seasons, particularly during a Black Friday sale and in the lead up to holiday shopping, because for scammers, there’s money to be made.
Which should lead you to the question: what is a ghost store, and how do you steer clear of them?
What’s a ghost store?
Halloween’s lure of ghost stories may well be fine around October 31, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the year gets a reprieve from a real life assortment of ghost stories.
And ghost stores are not “ghost stories”, even if the words seem familiar.
Rather, a ghost store is an online shop that’s intentionally not real, and yet says it sells real goods.
Often, what it sells is clothing or jewellery, the sort of thing that you can easily mock up images for, which these days thanks to AI is pretty much everything.
A ghost store runs a webpage like any other, and may even have a shop for you to use, add items to cart, and hand over your credit card details to a legitimate service to buy those items.
But the difference between a ghost store and a real one is that one represents actual products, and the other is a scam. In this case, the ghost store is the scam.
A scam that feels real
While most scammers are looking for ways to rip you off and take you for a ride without giving you something in return, ghost stores can end up sending you something. It just probably won’t be what you wanted in the first place.
Clothing items that look similar to what a photo offered is common, as is jewellery, but a ghost store will run images and “sales” that have no basis in reality.
The problem is the stores look convincing, and may even be built to look like local businesses. But they are anything but, and often a haven for scammers to send cheaply made goods advertised at high prices.
Where do you find ghost stores?
The crazy part might be how many of us find ghost stores, because there’s really only one major place they pop up: social media.
Ghost stores may well be websites, but they’re not websites that stick around for all that long, making them difficult to get picked up by Google search, especially when search itself is highly competitive.
So instead, the scammers running these faux outlets turn to a place that will happily take some money and show their stores to an audience. They can become especially common during major sales periods, such as Black Friday and the holiday season.
Social media services such as Facebook and Instagram can be a hotbed of ghost stores, particularly because it lines up with what someone on social may already be looking at.
If you’ve browsed an assortment of clothes already on your social feed, advertising can easily join the dots and throw in a related ad that points out a place where you can buy similar garments. And if that advertisement just so happens to connect you with a fake store, the scammer can make bank, taking your money and sending you something similar in return.
It’s not dramatically different from the scam ads social networks run with celebrity likenesses, a problem that has forced some famous people to police the problem themselves, monitoring advertising networks and complaining to the social media services regularly.
But it’s one that the advertising departments can sometimes be slow to respond to, often to the point where regular people lose out of money, even while the social media organisation makes money from the advertisement in the process.
How can you tell if a store is a ghost store?
If you accidentally find your way to a ghost store, working out if it’s real can be complex. After all, the shop is designed to look legitimate, so what telltale signs might it have?
One is likely going to be a lack of a phone number.
Check the contact pages and look for a phone number, the sort of thing you’d expect any decent business to have. No phone number is a red flag.
What about an Australian Business Number (ABN)? That’s the sort of thing you’d also expect a local business to have somewhere on their page, be it at the bottom where the credits are, or even somewhere on a terms of service page.
While international businesses don’t need an ABN, any shop advertising itself as Australian surely will, and an ABN makes it trackable using the government’s ABN lookup. That’s a system scammers will clearly avoid partaking in, making no ABN on a supposed-Australian shop a red flag.
But one other red flag is just how shoddily the website is made, something you can find when you go for a browse.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to make websites these days, with AI joining the dots more quickly.
A good website takes time, especially to flesh out all the parts that matter. Simply glancing at a menu can make a webpage look legitimate, but it’s when you click on the links, you might find it’s anything but.
Alternatively, you may find that if you punch in some nonsense into the URL bar of your browser after the domain, you’ll get a part of the site the scammers didn’t intend for you to see.
When we punched some nonsense into a ghost shopfront, we found example products in the system when the scammers didn’t account for a 404 page properly. Like ours, your Spidey-sense should tingle just a little bit when each of these red flags is raised, prompting you to close the site down and move on with your life.
How do you avoid ghost stores?
It’s worth noting that you can still find a ghost store through search, even if Google struggles to understand “ghost store” versus “ghost story”. Do a search for the former and you’ll probably end up with the latter.
But most of the time, these random and faux stores found over social media can’t be easily found in Google or other search engines, which is precisely why they turn to social advertising in the first place.
Appearing in Google can be difficult, and could be why we’re seeing criminals attempt to manipulate search for gain lately, a move that this publication helped in fixing.
However, ghost stores can’t usually make the dent that’s needed for the searches of products they “sell”. For that reason, they turn to social advertising.
Which rather makes it simple to avoid ghost stores: be cautious of the ads and links you see on social services, because there’s a good chance you’re going to be served ghost store links there over anywhere.
