Scammers used to fake products.Now they fake the whole store.

Fraudulent shopping sites are no longer one-off scam sellers. Scamwise sees a growing industry of professional scam retailers, opening new storefronts faster than they can be taken down.

Single-product cons have become boutique and big-box stores with hundreds of products, size charts and return policies. Much of it is AI-generated, which is how a store with no real inventory fills hundreds of product pages overnight.

80% of scam stores used an impossible discount or lazy pricing.

Scam retailers work the calendar like a merchandising team: World Cup merch in June, back-to-school in August, Halloween decor by early October. Fake holiday stores have been up since June.

Scammers find customers the same way legitimate retailers do: through ads on social media and search. Nobody types a scam store’s address into a browser. They click it from an ad while scrolling.

80% of ad fingerprints came from Google or Meta.

More than half live on reputable shopping platforms like Shopify, Amazon, Etsy and eBay. myshopify.com is the most common scam store domain submitted to Scamwise, with nearly 10x the cases of every other platform combined.

Scam stores are built to be disposable. They borrow the credibility of trusted platforms, collect payments, and disappear before anyone can trace them. When one gets shut down, another can be live within days or even hours.

Personal AI agents are racing to take over restocking, booking travel, finding the gift and checking out. That adds a third party to every transaction, one with its own blind spots and, increasingly, your card on file.