Be aware of online scams out there pretending to sell surf gear at deep discounts!
This happens. Currently O’Neill and Volcom web pages have been spoofed. And this is not the first time, a while back Surf Station surf shop in St Augustine, Fla was spoofed and so was Firewire.
Recently FaceBook and Instagram promoted links to spoofed surf gear web pages that look similar to a major surf brand’s web page. A friend actually fell victim to it and made a credit card purchase and unfortunately passed “the deal” link on. My friend was baited in by a deal my friend could not pass up that I even considered for a moment there…. but with some sloothing, I was able to determine it was a fake page created to rip people off and steal their credit card info or possibly install malware.
Signs of the the spoofed fake page in question:
-Too good to be true deal that insanely discounted product
– No other retailers were discounting nearly as deep the same products
-Manufacturer/retailer had a real page that was not discounting the exact same surf gear
-Landing page looked real on the spoofed web page but sub-pages links did not work
-Spoofed web page had grammatical errors that obviously a major brand’s web page would not have.
-Whois.com lookup search showed the web page was recently created and used a firm to register the domain name that the registering firm when googled has a reputation of spoofing domain names.
-E-mail to the real company confirmed they had been spoofed and had reached out to their lawyers.
If you were a victim of a spoofed page:
Contact your bank or credit card company ASAP to immediately dispute/reverse the charge and cancel the credit card you used. Also be diligent on the look out for other charges that might have occurred on that card. Be aware your personal ID was compromised such as address and credit card info. Lastly, be cautious of any email receipt sent to you with strange attachments that might be malware intended on uploading onto your computer.
Be safe! Surf more!!!
LBK
The Denver Surf Report 