The fake Apple store gives you thirty minutes to decide, and never asks for your card

The iPhone Duo went on sale on 23 October. In India it lists at 299,900 rupees, which is the sort of price that makes a discount banner irresistible. Kaspersky started finding fake storefronts almost immediately: pages built to look like Apple's own shop, offering 25 percent off, with a timer on screen saying the offer expires in thirty minutes.

The sites come in several languages, English, Arabic and Portuguese among them, with a currency picker and in some cases a promise that you will be redirected to Apple's official site to finish. You will not be. What the checkout collects is a name, an email address, a phone number and a delivery address. Then it tells you a manager will call to confirm payment. "Scammers move fast when a flagship device hits the market, because hype creates urgency and urgency lowers caution," said Kaspersky's Olga Altukhova, which is about as neat a summary of the whole category as you will get.

Skipping the card field is the part worth sitting with. A fake shop that takes your card number is a single theft, and your bank will usually reverse it. A fake shop that takes your name, your mobile number and your home address and then rings you is the start of something longer. The person on the phone already knows what you tried to buy, roughly what you were willing to pay and where you live, and they are calling you rather than the other way round. That is a far stronger hand than a stolen card.

None of this is really about Apple. It is the shape every product launch takes, and with Black Friday a month out you will see it again with consoles, televisions and anything that sells out. Reach a shop by typing its address yourself, and treat a discount with a clock attached as a sales technique before you treat it as a bargain. Tendvane's "browser hijacked" repair wizard handles the step before all this, for when a search for a shop keeps dropping you somewhere you did not choose.