I was looking for a pair of sneakers for my son. In particular, a pair of Skechers, the popular American brand.

I typed Skechers South Africa into Google, to see where I could buy a pair. At the top of the search was the website “Skechers South Africa”, which claimed to be the official online store. The site looked legitimate.

I was pleased to find a pair on sale. The discount was around 40%. This seemed reasonable, considering that a week earlier, I’d purchased a pair of hiking shoes at a 60% discount from another online retailer. They had arrived the next day.

When I clicked to pay for the Skechers, I was given a further discount of 43%. I thought it was strange but continued to provide my details.

I had to create an account which required my email address and home address. Then I provided my credit card details for payment.

For some reason, the payment did not go through. I attempted to contact the site. That was when I started to get suspicious. The contact form did not provide any contact details.

By now, the added discount was also raising a red flag in my mind, so I took a closer look at the website’s URL, which was skechers-south-africa.co.za.

I discovered in my Google search that there were several variations on this URL, such as skecherssouth-africa.co.za and skechers-southafrica.co.za.

I ran a search for “Skechers South Africa scam” and quickly came across complaints on websites like Hellopeter, where people reported that their shoes had never arrived, despite having received emails from the “supplier” confirming the order.

In some cases, people received an item of much smaller value, for example a cap instead of shoes.

When I shared my story on social media, it became apparent that several well-known brands are being targeted by fraudsters. They create fake websites that look just like the real company website, and then offer huge discounts to attract customers.

Shoe retailer Tsonga recently issued a warning that social media adverts are taking customers to fraudulent websites not affiliated with their brand.

These websites are set up in such a way that they deceive customers with the allure of items marked down by up to 80%.

The sites appear legitimate until you look at the URL. The fake sites pay Google so that they appear first on the search results page, providing them some credibility.

According to malwaretips, a cybersecurity awareness site, fake online stores sell personal and financial data, including names, home addresses, phone numbers and credit card details.

I was fortunate that my payment never went through. I had used my virtual credit card which means that the CVV number changes every hour, so it cannot be used again.

This is a great way to protect yourself when shopping online. I took the added protection of cancelling my card.

I did, however, receive a strange WhatsApp message from a business account within a few hours asking to talk to me. I blocked the number.

In hindsight, I should have seen the warning signs. While the discounts were not that suspicious given that the January sales were on, an immediate red flag was that the shoes were available at that discount in every size and colour. In fact, the website had a huge variety of shoes and all of them were discounted.

In most legitimate sales there are one or two pairs left, usually in uncommon sizes, which is why they are being sold at a discount.

Another obvious red flag was the website address – a URL with a hyphen is probably not going to be legit. If you are shopping online, malwaretips.com offers these tips:

Check for legitimate domain name and company details: Fake online shopping sites often have domain names with odd spellings and extra words. In my case the hyphen and the fact that there were several similar website addresses were warning signs. Check that a physical business address and a working consumer service phone number and/or email address are provided on the site.

Look for overly good-to-be-true deals: Scam websites lure customers by advertising extravagant discounts of 50-90%. As mentioned, this could be legit if there are only one or two items left, but a store would never discount every single item to that extent.

Verify company reputation: Search the website, business name and owner names online for any negative reviews or scam reports. You can check sites like Hellopeter and Trustpilot.

Analyse site security and payment options: Scam websites tend to only take irreversible payments like electronic transfers or cryptocurrency, and tend to avoid credit cards which have stronger fraud protection. This is possibly why my payment did not go through. However, they could still collect your credit card details in order to sell them to a syndicate.