The bank doesn't exist. The website cost twenty-five dollars.

An investment scam needs somewhere for your money to appear to be. Not a real account, just a page with your name on it, a number that goes up, and a login that works. It turns out you can buy that for $25.

Molly DeQuattro, VP of operations at Allure Security, was looking at a domain impersonating a client's brand and spotted an oddly specific phrase in the text: "one of the largest digital banking providers." Searching for that phrase surfaced around 2,200 domains. Of those, 1,095 still served a live page, 838 carried the exact phrase, and 810 of them, 97%, were built from Cuex, an off-the-shelf front-end template for currency exchange and digital banking sites. The research was published this week.

They work because they behave. Among those 838 sites, 770 had functioning login pages, 767 set session cookies, and 94% ran on Laravel, so registering gets you an account, a dashboard, a balance and a transaction history. Allure calls the trick legitimacy stacking: pile up interfaces, investment products, company details and a support contact until an institution that was never chartered anywhere looks like one. Nobody finds these by searching. Someone sends you the link - a broker, a loan agent, a person you got close to online, or a "recovery service" offering to claw back money you already lost.

The template betrays them if you look. Ninety percent still show a misspelled heading, "Curreny Charts." One site trading as Classtands Crest had source code referring to a completely different bank and posted registration data off to an unrelated domain. But the reliable move isn't spotting typos, it's refusing to take a bank's word for its own existence. Look it up in the official register for your country and type the address in yourself. And if one of these sites talked you into installing trading or remote-access software, Tendvane's Safety check will show you what landed on your PC and when.