(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba -- which also owns Taobao.)

Counterfeit shopping apps, as the name implies, are apps that impersonate well-known software. They either have the same interface as the original app or use the same name.

Their origin is usually unknown, but the danger is the same as with phishing websites. They can steal account passwords, bank information, spread viruses or simply cheat users out of their money.

360 also reported a number of other scams related to Singles’ Day, which broke another record this year. Aside from the flood of spam messages and trojans installed on shopping websites, one scam operates the other way around -- instead of users preying on other users, the so-called “Wool-pulling Party” are groups of users that target companies.

These days, however, the fleecing is done by bots. Singles’ Day offers plenty of great online deals -- but you need to be quick to click. 360’s report showed that many shoppers are in fact competing against machines instead of real people for these deals. In October alone, 360 detected more than 67 million "Wool-pulling Party" devices used to imitate actual users.

Other tricks of the trade included contacting users for a refund, citing a shortage of goods or lost delivery, and then leading them to phishing websites. Some fraudsters went even further by setting up fake shopping websites to collect users’ bank account information.

Between September and October, 127 cases were reported, resulting in losses of about 1.15 million yuan (around US$166,000). The report analyzed data gathered by 360 Hunet and the online security division of the Beijing police.

Although the usual stereotype is that older generations fall for this kind of scam, the post-90s generation turned out to be the biggest victims here. The reason behind this? Low supervision on gaming and virtual commodity trading platforms.