Indian Shoppers were targeted by Chinese Hackers During Online Festive Sales

According to a new report on Friday, It was revealed that Chinese hackers specifically targeted during the biggest festive season sales in the country. The hackers were from the GuangDong and Henan province in China.

The biggest festive sale of Flipkart was hacked. It all began days after flipkart announced its ‘Big Billion Day Sale’ in the month of October, after which a ‘Spin The Lucky Wheel Scam’ manifested itself fooling hundreds of naïve customers.

According to the investigation conducted by New Delhi-based CyberPeace Foundation, Chinese scammers used this opportunity to create a similar looking scam titled the ‘Amazon Big Billion Day Sale’

Internet users were sent false links to participate in a contest and win an OPPO F17 smartphone. “People who were duped into believing that they had won the phone as a prize would be asked to share the link via Whatsapp to their friends and family”, the report said.

The hackers had registered the domains for these links on famous retail site Alibaba’s cloud computing platform. All the links were registered to an organisation called ‘Fang Xiao Qing.’

‘’E-commerce scams are not new but what’s more alarming is the covert cyber warfare Chinese entities are launching in India on a repeated basis’’, said Vineet Kumar, Founder of CyberPeace Foundation.

The URL used for the contest redirects to multiple random sites which are all fake.

“The Big Billion Days is a campaign by Flipkart but hackers used the massive public interest in the campaign to make it seem as if the contest was being run by Amazon.” the report mentioned.

It would do consumers good to keep away from any such scams and close all free-ads in a bid to protect themselves.