SCAMMAGNIFIER: Piercing the Veil of Fraudulent Shopping Website Campaigns
Marzieh Bitaab
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 1 · Phishing & Fraud 1
In an insightful presentation at the NDSS Symposium, Marzieh Bitaab unveiled **SCAMMAGNIFIER**, a novel research initiative designed to expose the intricate, large-scale operations behind fraudulent shopping websites. This talk delves into a critical and pervasive cybercrime problem where users are directly defrauded, often losing significant sums of money through non-delivery of goods or the shipment of counterfeit items. The research challenges conventional detection methods that rely on easily manipulable website features, instead proposing a deeper, infrastructure-centric approach.
AI review
Solid academic research with a genuinely clever pivot: instead of chasing easily-spoofed surface features, Bitaab goes straight for the payment rails and uses merchant IDs as persistent forensic anchors. The campaign-concentration finding — 10 merchants running 54.5% of 14,000+ fraud domains — is the kind of number that should change how payment processors think about their fraud queues.