200 fake iPhone shops opened in the 24 hours after pre-orders went live

Apple opened pre-orders for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max on Saturday. Inside 24 hours, more than 200 fake iPhone shops had gone up.

The count comes from Alexandre Francois at WhoisXML API, who tracks domain registrations for exactly this. In a normal week, new domain names containing the name of an unreleased iPhone run at zero or one a day. On keynote day the figure shot past 200 within hours. The method does not change: register the names early around words like "apple" and "iphone 18", sit on them quietly, then build them out into complete shopfronts once Apple publishes the real specifications and photographs to copy.

Pre-order weekend is what makes this round bite. It is the one time of year when a page offering the Pro a couple of hundred under the 1,199 pounds Apple charges, shipping in three weeks, reads as a lucky find rather than an obvious lie, because genuine stock really is short and genuine delays really are long. Francois also notes that many of these sites are already flagged as dangerous by security scanners yet have not reached the blocklists that Chrome, Edge and Safari actually consult, so your browser may let you walk straight in. Two tells are worth committing to memory: a countdown timer on the product page, and a checkout that only accepts bank transfer or cryptocurrency. Both exist to move your money somewhere your bank cannot pull it back from.

Keep one fact straight while you shop. Only the Pro and Pro Max are on pre-order this weekend. The iPhone Duo opens on 16 October and the standard iPhone 18 is not expected until spring 2027, so any site taking a deposit for one today is selling a phone that does not exist. And if you have spent the weekend clicking through deal sites and are not certain what came along for the ride, Tendvane's safety check looks for browser extensions and startup entries you never installed.