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Marketplace scamsSeptember 2025

Fake copies of a marketplace site

A TV campaign brought a furniture marketplace new buyers and sellers, and scammers with them. The company switched off its own messaging to limit the damage, then brought in DefendDomain to go after the fake copies of its site.

The case in brief

Who
An online marketplace where individuals sell vintage and antique furniture.
When
September 2025, after its first TV advertising campaign.
What happened
Scam attempts against sellers rose sharply. Scammers posed as buyers and as the marketplace's own checking team, and built fake copies of its website to collect sellers' login and card details. To limit the damage, the company switched off its own messaging feature.
What we did
The company brought in DefendDomain to find the fake domains and get them taken down, instead of switching off parts of its own product.

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What happened

In September 2025, an online marketplace for vintage and antique furniture ran its first TV advertising campaign. Visits and sign-ups rose, and so did the number of scammers on the platform.

Scam attempts against the people selling on the marketplace rose sharply. Three tactics did most of the damage:

  • Scammers posed as interested buyers, or as the marketplace's own checking team, to win sellers' trust.
  • They built fake copies of the marketplace's website to collect sellers' logins and personal details.
  • They talked sellers into giving their card details, and sellers lost money.

The marketplace was taking the blame. Without a better option, it switched off its own messaging feature to stop the scams spreading, which took away a core part of the product while it looked for a proper fix.

Why it mattered

The marketplace depends on strangers trusting each other enough to talk and then to pay. A seller who is scammed once often stops listing, and buyers go where the furniture is. A TV campaign is also a bad moment for scam stories to be what new visitors find when they search for the brand.

What we were brought in to do

The company brought in DefendDomain to go after the fake domains instead of switching off parts of its own product:

  • We check lookalikes of the marketplace's web address every hour, so a fake copy is flagged when its domain is registered, gets a website or is set up to send email.
  • When a fake copy is used against sellers, we send the evidence to the companies that can take it down, and follow up with them.

We do not remove messages or accounts inside the marketplace itself. We go after the fake websites the scammers send people to.

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