The ad looked normal. A well-known brand of trainers, a clean website, a countdown timer on a “closing down” sale with 70 percent off. The payment went through, the confirmation email arrived, and then nothing. The tracking number led nowhere. The contact form bounced. Two weeks later the website itself was gone.
Fake shops have become harder to spot because building a convincing one costs almost nothing now. Templates look professional, product photos are copied from the real brand, and the domain name is often only a letter or two away from the genuine one. The good news is that most of them still fail a handful of simple checks, and running those checks takes about five minutes.
Checks like these are the bread and butter of practical tech advice sites. One of them is https://www.filesonic.pl/, a Polish general-interest portal whose technology section covers online safety next to more mundane things like phone settings and privacy controls. If you read Polish, have a look. If you don’t, the checks below work anywhere.
Check the domain before you check the products
Look at the address bar, not the logo. Scam shops love domains that imitate a real brand with something added: the brand name plus “outlet”, “sale”, “official-store”, or a country code that doesn’t match where the company actually operates. A shop selling a German brand at huge discounts from a domain ending in .shop or .top deserves suspicion by default.
Then check how old the domain is. ICANN runs a free lookup tool at lookup.icann.org. Type in the domain and look for the creation date. A shop claiming to have served customers since 2011 on a domain registered three weeks ago is lying about something. Legitimate retailers can have new domains too, but combined with other warning signs, a fresh registration is one of the strongest signals you’ll get.
Google also has a Safe Browsing site status page in its Transparency Report. Paste the address in and it tells you whether Google has flagged the site as unsafe. A clean result doesn’t prove the shop is honest, since new scam sites haven’t been reported yet, but a flagged result settles the question.
Reverse-search the product photos
Scam shops rarely take their own pictures. Right-click a product photo (or long-press it on a phone) and search it with Google Lens or a similar reverse image tool. If the same image turns up on the brand’s official site, in a dozen other suspiciously cheap shops, or on a listing from years ago, you know where it came from. Real retailers use brand photos too, so this alone proves little. A photo that appears on twenty near-identical shops with different names is another matter.
The padlock means less than you think
Plenty of people still believe the padlock icon next to the address means a site is safe. It means the connection between your browser and the server is encrypted. That’s all. Anyone can get a free certificate in minutes, and practically every scam site has one. Don’t treat HTTPS as evidence of anything except basic competence.
Look for a company behind the shop
A real business leaves a trail. Scroll to the footer and look for a company name, a registered address, a registration or tax number, and a phone number. In the European Union, online sellers are legally required to show who they are and where they’re based. A shop with only a contact form and a Gmail address is a problem.
If there is an address, paste it into a map. Scam shops sometimes list a residential building, a car park, or the address of a completely different company. If there’s a company number, look it up in the official business register for that country.
Read the returns policy and the terms, even quickly. Copied text often gives itself away with a different shop name left in by mistake, or with a returns address in one country and customer service hours in another time zone.
Prices that are too good
Big discounts exist. Outlet stores and end-of-season sales are real. But a shop selling current-season products from a major brand at 60 or 70 percent off, across its whole range, with stock of every size, is not running a sale. It’s running a script. Compare the price with two or three well-known retailers. If one shop is dramatically cheaper than everyone else, ask yourself why the brand would allow that.
Countdown timers and “only 2 left” banners are there to stop you doing exactly that comparison. On a real shop they’re an annoying sales tactic. On a fake one they’re the whole strategy.
Reviews, but not the ones on the site
Reviews shown on the shop’s own pages prove nothing, because the shop controls them. Search for the shop’s name plus “scam” or “reviews” and see what comes up on independent sites like Trustpilot or Reddit. A total absence of anything, for a shop that claims to be popular, tells you something too.
Watch for social media ads with comments turned off, or with dozens of very short, very positive comments posted within the same hour.
How you pay matters most
One rule matters more than the rest. Pay by credit card or through PayPal’s goods-and-services option, never by bank transfer, cryptocurrency or gift cards. Card payments and PayPal purchases come with buyer protection and a chargeback process. A bank transfer to a scammer’s account is usually gone for good.
A shop that pushes you toward a transfer, offers an extra discount for paying that way, or has a card form that mysteriously “fails” and then suggests an alternative, is showing you exactly what it is.
If you’ve already paid
Act fast. Call your bank or card issuer the same day, explain that you’ve paid a fraudulent website, and ask about a chargeback. The sooner they hear about it, the better your chances. Take screenshots of the website, the order confirmation and any emails before the site disappears.
Then report it. Your national consumer protection body or the police cybercrime unit will usually have an online form. It won’t necessarily get your money back, but it helps get the site taken down before the next person clicks the same ad.
