ScamCatchers Check a store

Is this online store legit? How to spot a fake shop before you buy

The ad looked great, the price is unreal, and the checkout page is right there. Thirty seconds of checking is the difference between a bargain and a charge you have to fight.

Fake online stores are an industry. Someone registers a domain, copies a real brand's product photos, runs ads at a 70% discount, and collects card details until the complaints catch up. Then they close it and open the next one. The stores are disposable, which is exactly what makes them detectable: they have no past.

What a store check actually looks at

Paste the store or ad URL into the Store / Ad Checker and ScamCatchers runs the checks that matter most for a website you are about to give a card number to:

• Domain age. When the website was registered. This is the strongest single signal for fake shops; a domain that is weeks old, selling established brands, is the classic pattern.
• Threat lists. Whether the site appears in Google Safe Browsing as malware, phishing or deceptive, and hosting-level risk signals.
• Review history. Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot profiles, and what people on the wider web say when they name the store specifically.
• Scam reports. Reports filed with ScamCatchers that name this store or its domain.

If you have a screenshot of the ad, you can upload that too, and the report will read the store name and claims from it.

The tells that give fake shops away

The discount is not possible

Retailers do not sell current-season brand-name goods at 60 to 80 percent off. Either the goods are counterfeit, or they do not exist. Both end the same way for you.

The store has no past

No reviews on any independent site. No social media older than a few weeks. A domain registered recently. Real stores accumulate a trail; fake ones are built to be abandoned.

The contact page is a form and nothing else

No physical address, no phone number, a generic email at a free provider. Or an address that, when you look it up, is a residential street or a different business entirely.

The copy is borrowed

Product descriptions lifted from the real brand, a "story" that mentions a founding year older than the domain, stock photos on the About page. Fake shops are assembled, and the seams show.

Checkout wants a payment method you cannot reverse

Card processing has chargebacks, so fake shops push you toward a wire, a payment app, crypto, or a "bank transfer discount." That preference is the tell.

Urgency built into the page

Countdown timers that reset, "only 2 left" on every product, "17 people are viewing this." Pressure is a substitute for trust.

Before you buy from any store you have not used

1. Run the URL through the checker.
2. Search the store's name plus "reviews" and plus "scam" and read what comes up.
3. Pay by credit card, never by transfer. If the store will not take a card, that is your answer.
4. Use a unique password if you create an account. Fake shops harvest logins as well as card numbers.

If you already paid

Call your card issuer and dispute the charge; card payments can usually be reversed if you act quickly. Change the password anywhere you reused it. If you paid through a payment app, wire or crypto, contact that provider immediately, because time matters more than anything else. Then tell us what happened: the domain you report today can be the warning the next shopper sees.

Frequently asked questions