PAPER
SCAMMAGNIFIER: Piercing the Veil of Fraudulent Shopping Website Campaigns In an evolving digital environment under perpetual threat from cybercriminals, phishing remains a predominant concern. However, there is a shift towards fraudulent shopping websites—fraudulent websites offering bogus products or services while mirroring the user experience of legitimate shopping websites. A key open question is how important fraudulent shopping websites in the cybercrime ecosystem are? This study introduces a novel approach to detecting and analyzing fraudulent shopping websites through large-scale analysis and collaboration with industry partners. We present ScamMagnifier, a framework that collected and analyzed 1,155,237 shopping domains from May 2023 to June 2024, identifying 46,746 fraudulent websites. Our automated checkout process completed 41,863 transactions, revealing 5,278 merchant IDs associated with these scams. The collaborative investigations with one of major financial institutions also confirmed our findings and provided additional insights, linking 14,394 domains to these fraudulent merchants. In addition, we introduce a Chromium web extension to alert users of potential fraudulent shopping websites. This study contributes to a better understanding of e-Commerce fraud and provides valuable insights for developing more effective defenses against these evolving threats.

ABOUT NDSS The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the organization’s’ YouTube channel.