Affiliate Websites Spoof Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Fake landing pages are spoofing websites for popular cryptocurrency exchange desks, TheNextWeb reports.

The pages, which are meant to look like legitimate websites for exchanges such as Binance, actually only contain affiliate links programmed to forward visitors to the real exchange websites.

While the Binance spoof doesn’t appear to steal users’ credentials, websites that use affiliate links can make money for business referrals. Affiliates of Binance, for example, receive 50 percent of the trading fees of any signees they’ve brought to the exchange desk.

“The commission you receive from the referral program will initially be set at a rate of 50 percent. This will then be adjusted after a certain period of time based on the situation,” the exchange’s affiliate terms read.

There are some ways to tell a genuine exchange website apart from an illegitimate one. To spot fake pages, users should check the certificates in the upper-left corner of their web browsers.

Users should also look to see if a website purporting to be legitimate updates exchange rates in real-time — the real Binance site does, for example. Copycat websites also may show a poorly placed “sign up first” button.

Binance is hardly the only cryptocurrency site to be the subject of copycats. Last September, Bitfinex warned users that attackers had made a phishing website designed to look like the company’s legitimate site, the blog reported.

Of course, other industries have fallen prey to spoof websites. In September, Equifax linked to a page on a fake version of its website created by an software engineer who was trying to demonstrate vulnerability of the credit rating agency’s site.

The news of the Binance spoof comes after two high-profile cryptocurrency thefts that netted tens of millions of dollars for schemers. In December, hackers made off with $64 million, and, in November, a heist brought in $30.95 million.