Most fraudulent shops are not sophisticated. They are fast — registered on a Monday, spending on advertising by Wednesday, gone before the chargebacks land. That speed is their weakness, and it is what these six checks look for. None of them needs technical knowledge, and they are ordered by how much fraud they catch for the effort.
1. Check how old the address is
This one check finds more fraud than the other five together. A shop that has been trading for six years has survived six years of disputes, chargebacks and complaints. A shop registered three weeks ago has survived nothing.
Of the 607,349 domains on file here, the ones in the bottom band are overwhelmingly recent registrations. Put the address into the search box and the report gives you the registration date in plain language: "3 weeks old" rather than a WHOIS dump.
Being new is not proof of anything. Every honest business was new once. It is a reason to apply the remaining checks properly, not a verdict on its own.
2. Look for a real identity, not a contact form
A legitimate shop wants to be found — it has a company name, a registered address, a VAT number somewhere in the footer, and a phone number that is answered. A fraudulent one has a web form and a Gmail address.
Read the "about" and "contact" pages before you read the product page. If the business will not say who it is, you have no route to a remedy when something goes wrong, whatever the checkout looks like.
3. Take the price seriously as a signal
A genuine retailer's margin on branded goods is thin. Nobody sells current-season stock at seventy percent off because they are new and want to build a customer base — they sell it at seventy percent off because they do not intend to ship it.
A discount that would be irrational for a real business is the single most reliable non-technical signal there is. Believing the price is the mechanism the whole scam depends on.
4. Check how you are asked to pay
This is the check that decides whether a mistake is recoverable.
- Card or a protected payment service. You can dispute the transaction and usually get the money back.
- Bank transfer, cryptocurrency, gift cards, or "friends and family". The money is gone the moment it leaves. A shop that only accepts these has chosen methods with no reversal for a reason.
If a checkout offers cards and then fails at the last step, pushing you to a transfer "because the card system is down", stop. That failure is the product.
5. Read the reviews, but read them properly
Reviews on the shop's own site are decoration. Look for the business on an independent platform, then look at the shape of what you find rather than the average:
- Fifty five-star reviews all posted in the same week is a purchase, not a reputation.
- Reviews that praise the site rather than a product were not written by customers.
- One-star reviews saying "never arrived", clustered in the last month, are the ones to read.
6. Check the address character by character
Lookalike domains substitute a character you will not notice at speed — a lowercase L for an
I, an rn that reads as m, a hyphen where none belongs, or a
different ending on an otherwise correct name.
The reliable habit is not to inspect links but to stop following them. Type the address yourself, or use your own bookmark. A link in a message is chosen by the sender; an address you type is chosen by you. There is a whole guide on this, because it is how most account takeovers start.
If you have already paid
Act in this order, and quickly — the first hours matter most:
- Contact your bank or card issuer and say the word "fraud". Ask about a chargeback. Do this before anything else.
- Keep everything — the order confirmation, the URL, screenshots, the payment reference. Run the domain through an analysis and save the PDF: it is dated and sourced, which is exactly what a disputes team wants.
- Report it to the consumer-protection or police body in your country. They can act on patterns across many victims in a way you cannot alone.
- Change any password you reused on that site, starting with your email.
Do not send more money to recover the first payment. "Release fees", "customs charges" and "verification deposits" are a second scam aimed at people already known to pay.