We lost £1,000 on a fake holiday booking
The internet is a shoppers’ paradise. At the click of a button, you can snap up anything from your weekly food shop to a rare collectible, a holiday, or a car.
But the boom in online trade has also made the internet a target for crooks, who use lookalike websites to dupe shoppers out of millions of pounds every year.
Customers part with hundreds – sometimes thousands – of pounds in a single purchase, in the belief they’re shopping safely on bona fide websites, not realising that they’ve been lured to a bogus alternative. The biggest victims are households buying items on auction websites and holidaymakers hunting for bargains online.