Counterfeit finally posing as a national security threat for US

Tweet from Homeland security

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security´s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans on Friday released a 54-page report to the president on "Combating Trafficking in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods", promising to strengthen scrutiny, enforcement and punishment to tackle what it calls a rising problem in e-commerce.

We´ve been warning about this fraud long time ago, even before of publishing the SANS paper "Tracking online counterfeiters". Desenmascara.me is our online service to help both: consumers and brands against this illicit business plaging Internet. Finally it seems this illicit business will have the attention required. As we said in Spanish: "Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena".

The report contain metrics about the problem whose many of them are extracted from a OECD report I had already pointed out months ago. Nothing new about the landscape of the counterfeiting trafficking landscape and some key problems identified. In contrast, the interesting part of this report is the section 7. Immediate Action by DHS and Recommendations for the USG:

Times are turning interesting on this area, let´s see what´s coming with the implementation of these strong actions. Stay tuned.

Worldwide Fake North Face campaign of websites hosted under plenty of TLDs

                    ".ch, the most secure top level domain (TLD) in Europe."                                

(Ref: https://www.switch.ch/stories/fakewebshops/)

The above sentence might be true. The proof?

Just take a look to this FAKE campaign of a single actor targeting multiple worldwide TLDs except .ch. The reason?. Likely to have a higher lifetime = profit. 

They know that if they set up the FAKE webshop under .ch, this TLD is being actively monitored for this type of fraud hence the chances to be detected and take down the webshop would increase. Best course of action? - to avoid it.

Few examples of FAKE webshops under random European countries:

FAKE Polish webhsop (https:// www.thenorthfacesklep.pl)

Fake Spanish webshop (https ://www.northfacees.es)

Fake German webshop (https ://www.northfacegermany.de)

Fake Italian webshop (https ://www.tnfitalia.it)

But it is not about Europe. This FAKE campaign targeting this specific brand is worldwide: 

Passive DNS information.

Just an observation from the timing of the FAKE domains registration, you can see that the bad guys also have Christmas holidays. There is no activity observed between December 18th and January 8th :)

Desenmascara.me just do one thing but we do it with a laser-focus approach: we do detect and flag online counterfeiting (and fraud) related websites as the above ones for hundreds of different brands targeted by counterfeiters.

We are collecting the most comprehensive dataset of counterfeit-related webs with two simple goals in mind: 

1. To provide a free service for online consumers to avoid them being scammed.
2. To provide a commercial service to brands affected, payment platforms, ISPs and domain registers. 

The ultimate goal is to stop this massive online fraud. If you are interested just contact with me.