Everyone is ready for Olympics season, including the fraudsters.

The Paris 2024 Olympics have gotten attention from fraud experts, particularly the fake ticket scams associated with the high-profile global event. For context, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics saw an estimated 450 million attempted cyber attacks (2.5x higher than the 2012 summer games).

The massive appeal of the Olympic Games makes it a prime target for data scams, making it critical to stay ahead of these risks when booking travel, tickets or accommodations. These scams include phishing attempts from fraudulent websites, along with fake Olympics-branded websites designed to capture personal information to sell on the dark web.

Like other high-profile events, such as the Super Bowl, fraudsters will create websites purporting to sell tickets that serve to take unwitting customers information and money. The French Gendarmerie Nationale have already identified and taken down 338 fraudulent Olympics ticketing websites, and there are likely many more yet to be identified.

Scammers are reportedly building networks of fake ticket sites to perpetrate these schemes at scale. These websites can be extra hard to spot as many of the websites are in different languages due to the international nature of the Olympics, creating more opportunities for people to fall victim to fraud.

The Olympic Games' organizers have offered a clear channel through which to purchase tickets. When purchasing Olympics tickets online it is recommended you purchase through their official website. When in doubt about the authenticity of a website, it is recommended you navigate to that website on your own rather than blindly trusting a link.

It’s important for consumers to understand that the impact of a single data incident goes far beyond a single fraudulent website. Protecting your digital identity means being vigilant about how and where you provide your personal and financial credentials online.

Unfortunately, the fallout from having your credentials compromised on these types of fraudulent websites can be long lasting as the data is often packaged up and sold, putting yourself at even greater risk. Stolen personal credentials can be used for many types of fraud, such as account takeover fraud, identity fraud, phishing schemes or synthetic ID fraud - just to name a few.

For context, the total number of data breach victims at the end of Q2 in 2024 has already surpassed the number of victims in 2023 by more than 1000%. Far too often, consumers are unknowingly part of data scams veiled as legitimate operations. Being aware of what risks exist, and what to look out for, can help consumers proactively protect themselves from these ever-evolving fraud threats.

Want to learn more about how you can protect yourself and your customers?