Financial expert examines successful fake shop finder model: Consumer advice centers identify over 50,000 fake shops. Difficult to distinguish between real and fake shops, says Oliver Havlat. How does the tool work?

Financial expert examines successful fake shop finder model: Consumer advice centers identify over 50,000 fake shops. Difficult to distinguish between real and fake shops, says Oliver Havlat. How does the tool work?

According to a report from supertipp-online.de, the fake shop finder is a successful model for the consumer advice center. Since its launch about a year ago, the tool has examined more than 1.3 million websites and identified over 50,000 fake shops. Over the past 12 months, the tool has been used on average over 4,000 times per day. Fake shops have been a problem since the dawn of online trading, but their number has increased in recent years as increasingly technologically advanced methods are used to create deceptively genuine offers. This makes it increasingly difficult for consumers to distinguish real from fake shops on the Internet, and if they fall for a fake shop, they often have difficulty getting their money back, as the operators are often based outside Europe.

The fake shop finder fully automatically analyzes various features of the shop page, such as the information in the legal notice, and compares this with other information such as the entry in the commercial register. All of this is used to calculate the probability of whether it is a fake shop or not. Consumers could check manually using this data, but the effort would be incomparably great, especially since the fake shop finder also includes data that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as anomalies in the website's source code.

The enormous increase in fake shops and the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence for their creation mean that the fake shop finder needs to be continuously developed. With ongoing operations and ongoing development, the consumer centers of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt are now also taking part in the project, supported by their respective state ministries.

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