Signs you have found a fake website pretending to sell goods

Signs you may have found a fake website pretending to sell electronics, clothing or jewelry.

1) Lists several different shipping companies and shows icons but not links.

Fake sites can't risk having a link to the official shipping company website for buyers to click on, then those shipping companies will find out about the fake site and are able to get it shut down for unauthorized use of logos.

2) Lists payment options that include Western Union, moneygram and/or bank transfer whether there are other options listed or not doesn't matter.

No legit company is going to pay an employee to leave the office, drive to the Western Union store, moneygram shop or bank, withdrawal the cash and bring said cash back to the office or take it to another bank for deposit, then drive back to the office.

3) Free shipping, especially internationally and a guarantee of 3-4 day shipping

International shipping is expensive and can take weeks while clearing customs is difficult and time consuming and no one is going to do all that for free or reduced price.

4) No owner's name, street address, warehouse street address and/or phone number.

Why bother making any of it all up, the site doesn't have anything to sell anyway so why bother.

5) The only way to attempt to contact anyone on the site is by a free email address and/or IM chat.

Easy to block and ignore your emails and chat requests and easy to close down that free email address and disappear forever.

6) The street address given can't be found by google map or is a vacant lot, residential neighborhood or strip mall with a ship-n-pack type store.

None of those locations is the type of address for any online store with a supposed huge warehouse to be doing business from.

7) The site claims to have been in business for years but a check of the who-is information shows that the site was registered for one year only a few weeks or months prior.

Less-than legit sites frequently say they have been around for much longer than they have and are rarely registered for more than one year, why pay for longer if the owner doesn't think the fake site will last that long.

8) Phone number that starts with +44-70, +44-71, +44-72, etc. all the while saying they are located in the United Kingdom.

That type of phone number is from a United Kingdom cell phone redirect service that can be answered anywhere in the world by anyone and is a favorite service of scammers that want to pretend to be located in the UK, real companies that are really located in the UK have no need for such a service.

9) 100% money back guarantee or refund policy but no mention of how you can get that refund.

Why bother making up a refund policy when nothing is being shipped anyway.

10) Mentioning that they are 'legitimate', 'honest', 'legal', 'real'.

[sarcasm mode] Because real companies have to tell you that they are not fake. [/sarcasm mode]

These are just a few of the more common red flags denoting a fake website.

The electronics/games one is a favorite of Russian scammers that are laundering stolen credit card data. They even buy google ads to lure people in. Here are 2 threads about it. The first link is to a page with a lot of info rather than read the lengthy thread:

Ebook websites, fraud charges, Devbill/DigitalAge/Pluto Page 50 - dslreports.com

[Scam] fake website - dslreports.com

Another Russian favorite is the reshipping scam. They will convince someone to accept packages purchased with stolen credit cards and reship the electronics and jewelry to the scammer. When the shipping company is notified by the credit card owner that the number is stolen, they go looking for the receiver of the package to pay everyone back. The victim gets the real life job of paying back the credit card owner, shipping charges to the shipping company and the online store.