Scam shops: the official lists, and nine signs that come sooner

There is no global blocklist. Consumer protection is national, so each country's authority keeps its own — and many keep none at all. Start with the authority where you live, and where the trader is based if that is somewhere else.

In the EU, the European Consumer Centre network takes cross-border cases between member states. The Federal Trade Commission publishes consumer alerts in the US, Action Fraud takes reports in the UK, and econsumer.gov pools cross-border complaints for authorities in more than forty countries.

About our own scanner, plainly: the lists it compares every shop against are the Czech and Slovak ones, because those are the two it can read reliably. Being on one of them drops a shop to zero here regardless of how polished the site looks. For a shop registered anywhere else, that signal simply is not available, and we say so on the result rather than implying a source we do not have.

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.

The mental picture of a scam site — flashing banners, broken English — is fifteen years out of date. Today's fake shop runs on the same template as an honest one, takes its photography from the manufacturer, and has had its copy proofread.

The difference moved elsewhere: to who the trader is, how old the domain is, and how the shop lets you pay. Those cannot be faked cheaply, because a fraudster needs to stay untraceable and to be paid irreversibly.

An honest shop names the trading company and its registration number in the footer or the terms. Look that number up in the register of the country the company claims to be in — most EU states, the UK and the US publish theirs free.

When there is no number at all, you do not know who you are contracting with, and in a dispute there is nobody to pursue. A missing trader identity is the single most common reason a site ends up on an official list.

Inside the EU, a VAT number is often the one independent confirmation you can get. Two letters and digits; check it in the EU's VIES system, which returns the company's name and address for most member states.

A shop with thousands of products on a six-week-old domain is an unlikely combination. Building a catalogue, arranging suppliers and getting operations running takes months.

Fraudulent sites are built for a short life: register the domain, advertise hard on social media for a few weeks, take the money, and disappear before the first complaints land. Any WHOIS lookup will give you the registration date.

This is the single most useful check on the page. A card payment can be disputed with your bank, which gives you a route back to your money. A bank transfer, a wire, gift cards and cryptocurrency give you none — once sent, it is gone.

A shop that accepts only irreversible methods did not arrive there by accident. Be especially careful about an account held in a country that has nothing to do with where the shop claims to be.

“Family run.” “Since 2009.” “Fifteen years of serving customers.” These sentences cost nothing and do a great deal: a shopper who believes the shop long predates them stops looking for reasons to be careful.

Checking takes a minute. Any WHOIS lookup gives you the registration date, and when a site claims fifteen years on a domain registered last November, that is a contradiction an honest shop has no reason to carry. Our scanner watches for exactly this: it compares the year the site claims against the date the domain was actually registered.

Borrowed credibility is just as cheap. “As featured in” with newspaper logos and not one link to an actual article is a claim that cannot be checked, because there is nothing to check. Try finding the article.

The offer ends in 14 minutes. Only two left. Seven people are viewing this right now. There is one purpose: to deny you the time to do what you are doing — checking the shop.

You can test it directly. Leave the page, close it, and open it again in a private window. If the countdown jumps back to full and “only two left” is still two, that is not stock and not a deadline, it is a picture. An honest shop whose sale ends on Sunday still ends it on Sunday after you close the browser.

Pressure alone does not mean fraud — large chains use it too. Combined with a young domain and payment in advance, it fills in the picture. Which is why the scanner counts urgency as one signal out of more than thirty-five, not as a verdict.

Closing after all these years, so everything must go. My husband fell ill and we cannot keep it running. Part of the proceeds goes to an animal shelter. Sympathy works exactly where the price alone would raise an eyebrow — instead of asking “why is this so cheap?”, the reader answers themselves: “ah, that's why.”

The tell is that the story carries no verifiable name. No company, no person, no place. Try pasting the text into a search engine in quotation marks: on template shops you will find the same touching paragraph on five other sites at different addresses.

The same goes for charity. A genuine fundraiser names the recipient and can be confirmed with them. “A portion of proceeds goes to a good cause”, with no cause named, is decoration, not a commitment.

Pop-ups along the lines of “Sarah from Leeds just bought this” are a script, not an event. The names and towns are drawn from a list, and they appear on empty shops where nobody has ever ordered anything.

Ratings work the same way. Two hundred reviews, all five stars, all short, all written in one week, are not customers. What matters is where the reviews are: a rating on the shop's own site was written by the shop. Look for the shop on independent platforms and in forums — anywhere but its own domain.

A particular case is the shop that presents itself as local — local domain, local currency, a local address in the footer — whose terms give a returns address on another continent. It need not be fraud, but it changes the deadlines, the cost of returning anything, and your practical chance of enforcing anything at all. It is certainly not what the first impression promised.

Your card issuer first. Chargeback windows are limited — often around 120 days from 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, or econsumer.gov for a cross-border complaint. 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.