Technical Analysis: The Abercrombie and Fitch Brown Pants Fiasco, "Splogs," and you
WARNING - This post will ultimately lead you to sites using offensive racial terms.
My Twitter friend Wesley pointed me this apparent Abercrombie and Fitch website advertising a pair of N***** Brown Pants. Here's a screenshot if that link dies. After the shock and frustration wears off, you ask yourself "How could this happen?" This link is spreading all over Twitter and the social web right now, and I'm sure that the Abercrombie PR machine will jump on it when their Twitter person wakes up.
Let me walk you through a few things.
- First, what a technical-type person does (or should do) in this situation.
- Second, why the internet is WAY WAY more screwed up than you ever thought
- Third, why no one should really be buying anything on the web.
The Technical Details
While it's possible that an idiot at Abercombie entered the N-word text, my eye immediately went to the domain:
Note the dashes and the "and?" No internationally-known and copyrighted brand would have such a lousy domain. I'd expect Abercrombie.com, full stop. In fact, it is.
I loaded up Domain Tools to see who owns this obvious knockoff. Like actual physical knockoffs of pants, there's no good way to tell what's real and what's not. I hit: http://whois.domaintools.com/abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com
Registrant Contact:
su ye
ye su
+86.095156230147 fax: +86.095156230147
NO.217 North Street, Yinchuan Qinghe
yinchuanshi ningxia 750000
CN
The domain is registered in China. OK, this is NOT Abercrombie's site. It can also be confirmed by the poor English on the site's about page as well as the throwaway reference to Chinese piracy:
A&F is the favorite brand of American college students, a lovely deer printed on the front of the youth fashion. Its fashion and personalized style always the certain reason some youngsters follow. Nowadays, Abercrombie and Fitch piracy in China has spread to unimaginable proportions. Soft cotton is comfortable in the apparel.
OK, so how much of a problem is this and these pants? The combination of the N-word along with a unique brand-name like Abercrombie makes for a good hash. That means these words together, especially if you add "pants," makes for a search term that is unlikely to happen in the wild.
It's worse than you think
If we then Google for the four words together (forgive me) you can see hundreds if not thousands of fake domains. For Example:
- newabercrombies.com
- abercrombieandfitchoutletsale.com
- abercromibesaleonlione.com
- marvelousabercombie.com
- afsonlinesale.com
- cheapabercrombiestore.com
You get the idea. There are at least hundreds. All with the same pants, all registered in China. I can't imagine, sadly, that there's ANYTHING that Abercrombie could do about this except try to get the domains shut down - one by one.
How could your Mom possibly know this?
These are automatically generated sites, like "splogs." Splogs are spam blogs. They aren't real stores, there aren't real people behind them. They are almost like computer viruses, except they make stores. In this case, it appears that someone in China at some point designed a system that could churn out fake stores from a single database. That's why these pants keep appearing on hundreds of other sites.
Imagine if you just wanted a regular pair of pants and didn't see this pair? How could you possibly tell if this the site you want? There's no good way. Here's what you CAN do.
- Make sure the URL starts with https:// when you are checking out.
- Click the lock in your URL and see if the company name looks legit. Sadly, these can be faked also, but it's a start. HTTPS (SSL) doesn't mean "I can trust this site," it means "this conversation is private." You still might be having a private conversation with Satan.
- Even better, if your Address Bar is green, click on it! This is a special "high trust" certificate that says you are really talking to who you think you are. This screenshot means "I am having a private conversation with a company that is KNOWN to be Twitter." Banks and big companies often use these special certs.
Ultimately, you, me, Mom and the Web need to develop a better "Internet Sense of Smell." The bad guys want our credit card numbers and will do everything they can to get them, even make ten-thousand fake Abercrombie and Fitch sites.
UPDATE: Thanks for the comments! If you (or Mom) had the Web of Trust installed, this is what you would have seen when visiting an evil site like this. I'm installing this free tool on Mom's machine today.
Good luck out there. It's a messed up web.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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ctrlShiftBryan
Thanks for the update on this, including how I can help my parents understand a bit more about how to spot a real business domain.
Tom
Note the dashes and the "and?" No internationally-known and copyrighted brand would have such a lousy domain. I'd expect Abercrombie.com, full stop. In fact, it is.
It's funny you say that. Because they actually OWN the domain name: http://www.abercrombie-and-fitch.com/
It happens to automatically redirect to http://www.abercrombie.com/
Once a person realizes that the web is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, they're more likely to embrace tools like ScriptNo, NoScript or Ghostery. That leads to safer Non-Technical Friends, which means happier techies everywhere.
Looking at Abercrombie and Fitch website, try to find information about an outlet (they do exist). Looking at the URL I'm guessing that is how someone landed at the fake site you reference.
I'm sure the geniuses in the marketing departments don't want to acknowledge the outlets exist because that would take away business from the stores. Of course their customers will still try to find information about the outlets which leads their customers to the fraud sites.
BTW, although more banks should use High Trust certificates, less than half of the major ones use it, even Chase doesn't have a green bar.
It's funny you say that. Because they actually OWN the domain name: http://www.abercrombie-and-fitch.com/
It happens to automatically redirect to http://www.abercrombie.com/
A lot of legitimate companies are forced to engage in the practice of defensive registrations and/ or legal/ administrative actions in order to keep poachers and crooks from registering domains for such similar uses as we see here with abercrombie-and-fitchoutlet.com...
Apparently Abercrombie & Fitch engages in this practice at least to some extent (abercrombie-and-fitch.com)... the fact that it automatically redirects to Abercrombie.com speaks to that.
You just can't possibly account for every possible combination.
So, you'd be able to click on hanselman.com and see (Private individual) in WA, USA, or microsoft.com and see Microsoft Corporation in WA, USA. Seeing that Twitter's domain and SSL certificate are registered from the same place would be a good extra check.
I'm sure the geniuses in the marketing departments don't want to acknowledge the outlets exist because that would take away business from the stores. Of course their customers will still try to find information about the outlets which leads their customers to the fraud sites.
Quite. They should nevertheless provide some way of confirming that an outlet is genuine. The fraud sites not only take business away but sully the brand...
As someone who has visited many parts of Asia and also lived there, this whole situation is funny to me. Generally speaking, there is a fascination in Asia with putting various random English words/phrases on things, especially clothing. A lot of it just doesn't make any sense and often it is humorous to native speakers (for many examples see websites such as Engrish.com).
Of course, it goes both ways. Americans get random Chinese characters tattooed on their bodies without really knowing what they mean as well. I'm sure there are occasions when these usages are just as funny to Asian people as their use of English is to us.
The reason this particular bad usage of the English language on a knock-off site has gone so viral is because they are using a word that is shocking and offensive to most native speakers. People see this as almost a hate crime. Furthermore, it's a knock-off of a big brand name that's already had many controversies associated with it. But the racism angle is really pretty ridiculous because the people who created these websites almost certainly had no understanding of what they were writing here. They want you to think it's Abercrombie stuff and buy it. They have no desire to either make you hate Abercrombie or for you to see their knock-off website as a phony. They make no money off you when that happens.
Fake brand name clothing being sold by knock-off companies is nothing new, online or otherwise. It's been going on for much longer than the internet has been around. Maybe this situation is good since it calls attention to it as a problem. The web is certainly full of Bad Things, and full of racial hatred as well. This example may be one of the former, but I seriously doubt it's one of the latter.
This is a great quote!! Can I borrow this?? :-)
We are a SEO shop and sometimes have to investigate strange links pointing to a client's website.
At the source of these links you will find pages or entire sites - apparently generated - with lots of links and generated incomprehensible pseudo english text. These sites are only visible to robots, a human visitor would be immediatly forwarded somewhere else by script.
As to the purpose of these sites - some seem to be link farms used to fool search engines, others - I just don't know. Maybe my mind is not twisted enough ...
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