In recent months, we’ve noticed an increased number of high-volume health product campaigns that exploit cheap top-level domains (TLDs), reaching up to 60% of a TLD’s daily domain registrations.
This blog looks at current trends around health product scams and examines some of the TLDs providing domain names for these large campaigns.
Dragons’ Dens and Shark Tanks
Health product scams frequently take the form of fake news articles, often impersonating specific newspapers and featuring celebrity endorsements from well-known media figures who have supposedly used the products that are targeted. In this sense, they are similar to the cryptocurrency investment scams we’ve blogged about previously.
Recent scams impersonate organizations such as Fox News, the Daily Mail, The Today Show, and the New York Times, with the latest campaign of health product scams centered around products backed by the judges from the popular TV series Shark Tank (in the US) or Dragons’ Den (in the UK).
These articles then use affiliate links to direct users to landing pages that sell products, especially weight loss gummies that purport to induce ketosis, but also other products such as skincare creams, erectile dysfunction supplements, and teeth whitening kits.
The products (and even the landing pages selling them) may be legal. Still, fake news articles that lure victims to these sites frequently misrepresent the product with false claims and often profit from affiliate marketing. In fact, in the US, the Federal Trade Commission released a This article has been indexed from Netcraft