UK sees rise in copycat banking site scams

The U.K. has seen a major rise in copycat banking scams, where scammers create websites that pretend to be real bank websites. More than 2,000 copycat websites of Barclays, HSBC, Halifax, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander and Starling were discovered in data from the DNS Research Federation, according to a report by Yahoo! Finance.

Scammers use these fake websites to get customers to enter banking information and steal it.

"It's hugely concerning that thousands of banking copycat websites were reported in a single year — potentially leaving millions of consumers exposed to fraudulent content online," Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy for the consumer group Which?, said in the report. "Consumers who are just trying to bank online should not have to shoulder the responsibility of reporting scam sites and chasing domain registrars to take them down."

The consumer group surveyed members to ask about copycat banking websites and only 27% knew you could use a domain lookup service to look up when a site was registered. It is calling for regulations to force domain registrars to do more to combat these fraudulent sites.

"Domain registrars have a much bigger role to play in the fight against online fraud. With an election just around the corner, the next government must make fighting fraud a national priority, and place new legal duties on these companies to prevent scammers from setting up these fraudulent copycat websites," Concha said in the report.

The U.K. government is also considering efforts to seize domains used for criminal activity.