The owner of an eyewear ecommerce site says “online hitmen” are destroying her business.
As reported by Daily Dot, Kaila Uli of Brillies Sunglasses posted a video to TikTok explaining how she’s been targeted.
“I’m currently losing my business because of this,” she said in the clip. “I knew something was wrong when I logged into my Facebook Ad manager and I saw 83 websites connected to my pixel (Facebook’s ad tracker).”
The links turned out to be clones of her site. Then her traffic disappeared abruptly.
Uli said she’d been in business for four years and “was about to hit six figures per month.”
“I was getting posted by celebrities and loaning styling pieces to movies, and then it all stopped,” she said. “Not only did they clone my site, they got my pixel information, they got my Pinterest taken offline. This was a multi-layered, calculated attack that I was never meant to survive.”
The California-based company sells vintage sunglasses.
Daily Dot described the incident as a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. While her site is safe to purchase from, “through the creation of traffic disruptions, attackers are preventing users from accessing her web page,” according to the news report.
Uli added: “I did consider getting an attorney but he said it would be very expensive, and if whoever was doing it was located outside the U.S., I would have no recourse, so that’s it.”
But the story may still have a happy ending. Uli said in a follow-up video: “Within hours, you guys had connected me to IT people, cybersecurity people, people who knew what this what, who had seen it before and knew how to fix it. …
“I don’t know if I’m going to rebuild my business,” she said. “But it’s the first time in months I’ve felt like it was even an option.”