Don’t Get Scammed By This Fake UBYK Email!

With everyone slowly moving away from shopping through physical stores, attracted by fast delivery and low-prices, the chances of our personal information falling into the wrong hands is becoming a legitimate worry.

Today, that worry for many cyclists has become a reality as a fake email which claims to have been sent by online retailer UBYK has started to crop up in our inboxes.

We were alerted to the news by this thread on our forum. The email contains customer information including full name, address and phone number and attempts to con recipients with the promise of a free gift (well, free if shipping is paid, and that’s the scam).

Although we haven’t actually seen the email for ourselves, UBYK has confirmed that this is a fake email and customers should not to reply to it and to double check URL’s when ordering anything online that has a price too good to be true.

Savvy recipients of the email state that the URL, in this case, is an obvious giveaway being https://omgfunnylol.com (we don’t suggest visiting this site for security reasons) followed by an extension to the scam, clearly not an official UBYK URL. Despite the obviously fake email, it is said to look genuine when viewed on a mobile device where URL’s might not be so easy to identify.

Oh, and the fact that the mountain bikers who are receiving this email are being offered a Giro Synthe road helmet should ring alarm bells too.

Singletrack Forum members have already spoken to UBYK who have confirmed that they are aware of the issue and are working with the authorities to close down the site hosting the scam and to alert customers.

UBYK posted the following:

“Hi all,

It’s James from ubky. This is a FAKE email and site! Do not order!!!

We’ve been up all night trying to understand how it’s happened and put a stop to it. Our site uses the best SSL digital encryption and then on top of that we use cloudflair to provent hacking, we are in contact with the Police and security experts who seem to think it’s most likely our server provider thats been hacked. Not all the emails to us on this our actually our customers, infact it seems so far 60% aren’t, so it seems they have done this to a few companies (not sure if anyone had the Canecreek one last week). Please rest assured we DO NOT hold customers bank details, we use SagePay and PayPal to deal with the payment side of things.

The site is simply a fake version of ours, PLEASE check the domain address before ordering off any site with an offer that seems to good to be true.

Thank you customers, friends, co-riders who have been helping us with this.

On a positive note, it’s bloody nice to see how great the MTB community have been and… a road helmet?! From a very frazzled ubyk staff, thanks again.

The hosting company of the fake site is based in the US is getting this site pulled down.”

If you have received an email that you think might be a scam check for these telltale signs:

• Strange looking URL: As in the case above the URL might be a telltale sign, but also double check URLs that look official but have slight changes to the spelling. It’s common to see an ’s’ added to the end of a name or vowels swapped out.
• Check the wording of the email or suspicious site. “We send this product to you absolutely free” is too general. Spelling mistakes are another giveaway.