With AI, it's easy to whip up scam websites, really good looking ones.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Thanks to AI coding agents, basically anyone can program their own software without much technical

knowledge. You want to build yourself a website? Just tell your AI coding agent what you want,

and voila. But lowering the barrier to sophisticated web design is also opening the door to more

scams. Marketplaces Megan McCarty

Carino has more. The other night, I'm sort of half watching a spy thriller on Hulu and

shopping on my phone for a hair care product. If you must know, it was the curl moisturizing

moose from the Italian luxury brand Daviness. Being the savvy consumer I am, I know you can sometimes end up with counterfeit beauty products,

so I head over to Google to find something trustworthy.

First sponsored result, the Daviness North America official online shop.

Spoiler, It was not.

Truly, I empathize so much with people like yourself who find these threats in the wild and assume that they are legitimate.

That's Ginny Spicer, a threat intelligence analyst at cybersecurity firm NetCraft, which says last

year it identified 100,000 AI-generated websites impersonating almost 200 different brands.

We can see the basic hallmarks of AI generation that you might see repeated in the code.

We're even watching to see how many emojis are left into the site code because that's not something people typically do.

But on the front end, my fake Daviness website looked nearly identical to the real thing,

at least on a mobile phone, no misspellings or janky graphics.

It's not that I didn't know that sophisticated scam websites exist.

They've been around a while. I guess I just wasn't expecting

to encounter one in a Google search for a niche Italian hair product. Charles Henderson with

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