DO NOT PUT ANY PERSONAL OR TEAM INFORMATION IN. IT IS POSSIBLY A PHISHING WEBSITE. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM HERE. DO NOT MAKE AN ACCOUNT. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT GIVE THEM $200
When googling for WCP parts I stumbled upon this website. They list many WCP parts at… Well… Stupid prices. And as the saying goes “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is”.
I don’t trust it and my biggest worry is an FRC team will spend money here and never see it back. We all work way too hard to raise those funds to be ripped off by scammers. If they are actually selling WCP items and designs at knockoff prices I’m concerned that the real WCP is unaware of this. If someone was scammed by these people they are likely to blame the real WCP. The real West Coast Products should investigate this a.s.a.p. before Kickoff.
Am I being ridiculous and paranoid or is this just totally wrong?
@R.C , If this is indeed a phishing site as it does appear to be, please let me know if you’d like my assistance in getting it taken down. I threat hunt phishing sites like this in my free time so I’d love to help out
Looking at the Whois, it’s a scam. The domain was registered in Malaysia on 11/16/2023 by the registrar “Web Commerce Communication Ltd”. All of this is on top of the broken links to their social media that lead back to the website and says “Enjoy 50% off on essential items Fashion Impact” on the top banner.
Edit: After more sleuthing through everything, it looks like they have their domain registered through here as a way to try to not get into trouble or be hunted down.
Best practice I should add a big warning at the top to not put any personal or team info in. No accounts, passwords, etc. don’t buy anything. Any other advice?
@R.C I noticed they are also using Shopify. Is this because it was easier to try and mimic you or it’s easier to scrape the image assets? Should other vendors be on the lookout and will you give us an end update once you have time to deal with this yourself. Sorry this happened, but I’m glad we caught it early or seems like it anyways.
So unfortunately with the internet, you can find things to scrape a lot of e-commerce stores. Even doing a basic preliminary search for “Shopify Scraper”, there are multiple links, extensions, and websites that can scrape any Shopify storefront, drop them into a CSV file which then allows you to upload it to your own Shopify (or other flavor of e-commerce website builder) template and then use it while making thresholds by saying “x products are going to be up to 50% off”. Here’s a BBC article on how widespread this issue is.
