A lot of web portals in India are cheating its customers by using unethical tactics in order to increase their sales.
Some of the common methods they use to exploit people are:
- If a user views an item a certain number of times then they increase the price of the product thinking that the user is desperate to buy it. There are automated algorithm which do this. For eg: When you browse air tickets for specific locations the rates increase when you come back to same flights(departure / destinations / same dates).
- Putting in “special offers” for “new” products and showing “sold out” within 30 seconds of the sale starting(they do not have many in stock). Then they show “suggestions” for other products to make the user buy them instead.
- Letting users buy a product that is not actually in stock, after the money is received they call and inform the user that the product is not in stock and that they will get the money back in a month. Meanwhile they gain interests out of that money, when they do this to a large number of users they will make lots of money
- Putting in fake “special offers”. Eg: If a product is worth 6000 INR they increase the cost of that product to 10000 INR a few days before the “offer” and then on the day of the “sale” they cut it back to 6000 INR and claim that it is a 40% offer
The Government of India should look into this type of scamming as it is happening in a wide scale in India. Also the government should look into how they are using the “big data” that is collected from the users and if they store them securely.
We recently came across an Indian site (alexa rank of <100 in India) that when given “forgot password” sends back the password in clear text to the users email. This means that they are storing the passwords without any sort of hashing; even this very basic security method is not implemented. The government of India should look into such sites and make them have mandatory security policies that secure user data and information.
