Hey Dude is a legitimate company that sells a variety of men’s, women’s, and kids’ footwear, including sneakers, sandals, and slip-ons. The company’s website is www.heydude.com. However, unfortunately, scammers recently misused Hey Dude’s name and branding to try to trick people into making a purchase on a scammer-controlled, copycat version of Hey Dude’s legitimate website. Scams such as this are not uncommon, and this recent Hey Dude situation is a good example of how they operate. Read on to learn how to better identify these types of scams and avoid being a victim.
HeyDudeStores Com Scam
The website the scammers created to try to deceive people into inadvertently sharing their personal and financial information with them was heydudestores[.]com. This website was in no way affiliated with Hey Dude — the scammers were just hoping people will be tricked into thinking it’s the legitimate website and feel comfortable entering their info onto it.
Here’s what the legitimate Hey Dude website (www.heydude.com) looks like:
And here’s what the scammer-controlled, fake Hey Dude website (heydudestores[.]com) looked like:
Of course, with heydudestores[.]com being a scam website, it is overwhelmingly likely that any purchases made on it were not honored. The scammers were simply using the website as a way of stealing people’s money and collecting their personal and financial information, which they probably intended to sell to cybercriminals/hackers on the dark web and/or use to commit further crimes themselves.
Fortunately, the fake website is currently offline, but when it was live, one of the big signs that it wasn’t to be trusted was its ultra-recent registration date (06/21/23).
The anti-scam website ScamAdviser considers sites’ registration dates when it evaluates their legitimacy, and heydudestores[.]com’s recent registration date is one of the things that goes against it in ScamAdviser’s eyes — resulting in the fake website getting a Trustscore of just 36 out of 100.
Some of heydudestores[.]com’s negative highlights according to ScamAdviser:
How to Avoid Scams for FREE
The truth is, there are lots of scams and scam sites on the internet and they’re getting even more difficult to detect with common sense alone. For an easy and reliable method of detecting and avoiding scam sites, check out our free browser extension: Trend Micro ID Protection.
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- By Tia | July 3, 2023