Cyber criminals making easy money from online marketplaces

The ease of use and convenience to shop from the comfort of the home/office are fast making online marketplaces - Amazon, FlipKart, eBay, and so forth - the preferable mode of shopping. However, we do not realize that in the process we continue to share a lot of personal information on the internet that cyber criminals can easily harvest and use for numerous crimes.

Fraud in the online marketplaces is on the rise and online marketplaces provide cyber criminals with ample opportunities to strike. Some of the ways cyber criminals exploit online marketplaces are:

• Using Stolen Credit Card Details: Cyber criminals abuse stolen card card details of genuine customers by using them to buy expensive goods. This is facilitated by the fact that payments on online marketplaces do not need customers to physically swipe their cards.
• Impersonation: Another method cyber criminals employ to make quick money through online marketplaces is to impersonate genuine sellers and sell fake and/or non-existent items. Incidents where customers pay for an item that was never received or received a fake copy of the item have been widely reported. Such 'sellers' are usually cyber criminals who dupe many customers into paying for 'items' and escape with all the money.
• Money Laundering: Cyber criminals also use online marketplaces as a conduit to launder money. They create multiple seller and buyer accounts using stolen or fake details. The fake 'buyers' buy non-existent items at high costs from fake 'sellers' and transfer funds illegally.

Online marketplaces are easy to exploit

Defrauding unsuspecting customers on online marketplaces has become all too easy. Using easily available criminal 'toolkits', cyber criminals can easily monetize their exploits, that too without getting detected. It can take months together for an online marketplace to realize that its platform was used for such criminal activities.

Be vigilant

Online marketplaces are making efforts to educate customers so they do not share their personal details with anyone claiming to be a representative of the company. On their part, customers, too, must remain vigilant and share only as much detail as is essential.

The article has been written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached on LinkedIn.