Lists of scam shops: where they are and why they are not enough
Several countries publish official blocklists of fraudulent shops. They are worth checking — and most scam shops are not on any of them.
People searching for a list of scam shops usually already suspect something: an advert with an impossible price, or money that has just left their account. The good news is that official lists exist. The trap is relying on them.
This page covers where to find them, how to check a shop yourself, and why absence from a list proves nothing.
Where the official lists are
There is no global blocklist. Consumer protection is national, so each country's authority keeps its own — and many keep none at all.
The Czech Trade Inspection Authority publishes one of the more usable ones, and it is the list our scanner checks every shop against. A listed shop drops to zero here regardless of how polished the site looks, because being listed is the strongest single signal available.
Elsewhere, start with your own national consumer authority. In the EU, the European Consumer Centre network handles cross-border cases. The FTC keeps consumer alerts in the US, and Action Fraud takes reports in the UK.
Why a list is never enough
Every blocklist is retrospective by construction. Before a shop can appear on one, somebody has to lose money, file a complaint, and have an authority investigate. That takes weeks or months.
Fraudulent shops are built around that delay. Register a domain, advertise hard on social media for a few weeks, collect payments, disappear before the first complaint is processed — and the same operation is already running three more sites under different names.
So a shop being absent from every list is not a clean bill of health. It usually means nobody official has noticed it yet.
How to check a shop yourself
- 1
Find the trader's legal name and registration number, then look it up in the relevant national register. No identifiable trader means nobody to pursue.
- 2
Check the domain's registration date with any WHOIS lookup. Weeks old, with a full catalogue, is a red flag.
- 3
See which payment methods are offered. Card and PayPal can be reversed; bank transfers, gift cards and crypto cannot.
- 4
Reverse image search a product photo. Stolen photography is the fastest tell there is.
- 5
Search the shop's name plus the word “scam” on independent platforms, not on the shop's own pages.
If you have already paid
Your card issuer first. Chargeback windows are limited — often 120 days from the transaction or the expected delivery date — and they do not pause while you wait to see if the parcel turns up. For a bank transfer the odds are worse, but call immediately: a payment can sometimes still be recalled.
Then report it. Your national consumer authority, plus the European Consumer Centre if you are in the EU and the trader is in another member state. Even when it does not get your money back, this is how the lists on this page come to exist.
Keep everything: order confirmation, payment record, all correspondence, and screenshots of the site. Fraudulent shops disappear, and the evidence goes with them.