The online fraud prevention company, Bolster, has reported that in November they saw an increase in new websites related to gift card fraud, with a rate of more than 220 fraud cases per day. The research team noted that Target’s balance checking page has been one of the most impersonated this holiday season.
Some of the spoofing attempts are more credible than others. One fraudster even imitating Target’s services to such an extent that most users would not be able to tell the difference between the official Target site, and the spoof site as they mimic the exact text, colour and layout. A targetgiftscard[.]com
domain has even been registered, making it even more difficult for shoppers to spot the scam. The only difference between the sites is that the links of the spoof pages either don’t work or lead to the same fraudulent page.