Chinese hackers targeted Indians with e-shopping scams

Parv Kohli

December 18, 2020

Festive season, end of the year sales, and offers on various shopping sites have given a window of opportunity for scammers to imitate sales campaigns like Amazon’s big billion days. Various bogus links are being spread all over WhatsApp and other messaging applications baiting people to participate in a contest and win prizes, later forcing them to share the same link to multiple contacts in order to receive their prize. An investigation conducted by CyberPeace Foundation found that Chinese hackers were responsible for creating these cyber-attacks, which were then maliciously spread via WhatsApp and targeted gullible e-commerce users with offers of free products. Founder and president of CyberPeace Foundation, Mr. Vineet Kumar finds the repetitive covert cyberwarfare from China alarming. After an open-source investigation to examine these links, it was found that all the domain links were registered with a Chinese organization called Fang Xiao Qing. The scammers registered their domains on Alibaba’s cloud computing platform. Such links are still actively running and widely being shared amongst the world—the lack of awareness making the common public an easy target.

Abridged fromBusiness Standard