The Phish Has a Website Now

Hi fraud fighters. Issue No. 4 of The Network Effect is here. This month: a phishing scam that used to be a sloppy email and is now a fully built dealership website, with a logo, a phone number, testimonials, and someone standing by to take your member’s wire.

I’ll tell you how I fell into fraud work in the first place, what phishing looked like when I started, and five things your team can check today without buying anything.

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I’ve been doing this long enough to watch the same fraud scheme get a facelift every few years. Same bones, new paint job, better budget. This issue is about one of those facelifts: a scam that used to be a sloppy email and is now a fully built website with a logo, a phone number, and someone ready to take your money.

I Didn’t Choose Fraud. Fraud Chose Me.

When I first started working in fraud, I was a part-time administrator. I wasn’t hired for my fraud-fighting skills because I had none, unless you consider being nosy a skill. In this industry, I absolutely do.

My first big-girl job, right after high school, was running the office for a concrete company. If you’re reading this and you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, that’s okay. Neither did I, until I landed my first credit union fraud job working Falcon reports and balancing GLs.

Honestly, it was another 10 years before I knew the fight against fraud was a passion and not just a paycheck. I learned this job in real time, and phishing was one of my first teachers.

When Phishing Was Just an Email

My first real fraud position was working Reg E claims. Teenagers were selling their debit cards and PINs to fraud rings in the Seattle area. The rings deposited counterfeit checks through ATMs, then pulled cash and bought money orders at Walmart. I thought that was chaos.

Then came our first phishing attacks. Members landed on a spoofed website and entered their online banking credentials and card information. Fraudsters used the stolen card data to make counterfeit cards and run ATM transactions down south. Our membership was narrow and specific, and members’ email addresses were public. We were an easy target.

That was the toolkit: public contact information, an email, and a fake website. Twenty years later, the fake website may be where a member goes to buy a car.

The Phish Doesn’t Live in an Inbox Anymore

Frank McKenna, Point Predictive’s co-founder, has been tracking websites impersonating car, tractor, RV, and heavy-equipment dealers. Small, established businesses without websites of their own are especially easy to impersonate. A buyer finds a below-market listing, wires money, and waits for a vehicle that never arrives.

In his September report, McKenna said he was finding five to 10 sites a day. He and Matt Vega had already helped take down more than 600. The FTC also issued a September consumer alert describing copied logos, vehicle listings, photos, and invented testimonials.

A polished website cannot establish who is receiving the payment. Read the FTC alert.

More Reports, Across More Types of Purchases

The BBB Scam Tracker analysis also shows how often buyers are reporting these schemes. Farm and heavy equipment lead the 2026 breakdown, followed by cars and trucks. The same verification habits matter across all of them.

Nine Months of Losses Already Exceed Last Year

McKenna’s October analysis of BBB Scam Tracker reports puts another number behind the problem: $6.6 million in reported dealer-cloning losses in the first nine months of 2026, compared with $4.5 million for all of 2025. These are reported losses in the analyzed BBB data, a separate measure from the September website-tracking snapshot above.

For a credit union, this may show up as a member asking for a wire. The site looks professional, the price sounds good, and the seller has an answer for everything. That is the moment to verify the business somewhere else.

Five Things to Check Today, No New Tools Required

None of this requires a new vendor, a new system, or a budget request. It requires staff who know to ask the right questions and feel empowered to slow things down when the answer doesn’t sit right.

The Fix Hasn’t Changed

Twenty-one years ago, the scam was a fake email with our logo on it. Today it can look like an entire business, complete with testimonials and a very real payment request. The production values changed. The volume changed. The fix hasn’t changed: verify through a channel the fraudster doesn’t control, and give your frontline permission to ask one more question before the money moves.

If your credit union has run into a cloned dealer site, or a fake version of your own homepage, I’d like to hear about it. The more of these we document, the faster we can help get them taken down.

Sources and further reading: We Found 1,300 Dealer Clone Websites; We’ve Closed 600 Of Them (Frank McKenna, FrankonFraud, Sept. 7, 2026). Fast Deals, Fast Cars: How AI Made Dealer Scams Go Wild (Frank McKenna, FrankonFraud, Oct. 12, 2026). Scammers are spoofing car dealership websites: What you need to know (Federal Trade Commission, Sept. 2026). Registration data lookup tool (ICANN, accessed Oct. 27, 2026). What should I do if a wire transfer is fraudulent? (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, reviewed April 2024).