Fake shops are the easiest scam to build and one of the hardest to spot in the moment, because they're designed to look exactly like a small, legitimate brand having a sale. Most of them don't steal your card and vanish β they take the payment, send nothing (or a cheap counterfeit weeks later), and close the domain before the complaints pile up. The checks below are ordered by speed: the first one takes seconds, and on its own it filters out a large share of fakes.
You don't need all seven every time. If a store fails two or three of these, that's your answer β close the tab and buy from somewhere you can verify.
The 7-check pre-purchase list
Look up how old the domain is
This is the single most useful check, and it takes 20 seconds. Paste the store's domain into a WHOIS lookup (who.is or ICANN Lookup). A site selling brand-name goods on a domain registered a few weeks ago is the classic fake-store signature β real retailers have years of history. ScamAdviser and most consumer-protection groups treat a freshly-registered domain plus steep discounts as the strongest combined tell there is.
Reverse image search the product photos
Fake stores almost never shoot their own photography β they lift it from the real brand, Amazon, or AliExpress. Right-click a product image (or long-press on your phone) and run it through Google Lens, TinEye, or Yandex. Bellingcat's reverse-image-search guide suggests sorting TinEye by oldest to find where a picture first appeared. If the same photo shows up on dozens of unrelated shops β or on the genuine manufacturer's site at a very different price β you're looking at a dropshipping front or an outright scam.
Sanity-check the price against reality
Prices far below everywhere else are the bait, not a bargain. Nike trainers for $25, an iPhone for $150, a designer coat at 80% off on a store you've never heard of β these aren't clearance, they're the lure. Open the real brand's site and a couple of established retailers in another tab. If the 'deal' is an order of magnitude cheaper and the only place offering it is this one unfamiliar shop, assume the product will never arrive.
Read the payment options carefully
This is where scam stores give themselves away at checkout. If the site pushes you toward bank transfer, wire, gift cards, Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, or cryptocurrency, stop. The US Federal Trade Commission's long-standing advice is blunt about this: those payment rails are chosen precisely because the money can't be clawed back. A legitimate store accepts credit cards through a recognizable processor, because credit cards give you a chargeback route if the goods never show.
Verify there's a real business behind it
Scroll to the footer and the contact / about pages. Is there a physical address, a company registration number, a working phone or a monitored email β or just a web form and a Gmail address? Search the company name in a government business registry for its stated country. Copied or boilerplate policy pages, a missing returns policy, and no verifiable identity all shift the burden of proof heavily against the store.
Read reviews off the store, not just on it
On-site reviews are trivial to fake, and scam shops stuff them with five-star copy that all reads the same. Search the store's name plus the word "scam" or "reviews" and look at independent sources β Trustpilot, Reddit threads, consumer forums, and any fact-check or scam-alert coverage. Be wary of a wall of identical glowing reviews posted within a few days of each other; genuine review histories are uneven and spread over time.
Notice the pressure, then check the claim
Countdown timers, "only 2 left in stock," and pop-ups claiming someone in your city just bought the item are engineered to stop you from doing the six checks above. Treat urgency as a reason to slow down, not speed up. If the store is being pushed by a viral social post or a too-good-to-be-true ad, run that claim through FAXTR's checker first β if it's a known scam pattern, a fact-checker has often already flagged it.
The combination that catches most fakes
If you only have a minute, pair two checks: domain age and price. A domain registered in the last few months, selling sought-after brands at a fraction of their normal price, is the fake-store blueprint. Almost everything else on the list β stolen photos, gift-card checkout, no real address β tends to come bundled with that pairing. When both of those line up, you don't need to keep digging.
When the "review site" is in on it
Scammers know people search for reviews, so some set up their own "review" and "is this legit?" pages that conveniently rate the fake store highly. Stick to sources with their own reputation to protect β established consumer organizations, Trustpilot profiles with a long and mixed history, and real discussion threads where people describe specific experiences. A review page that exists only to praise one obscure shop is part of the setup, not a check on it.
If you already paid
Act fast. If you paid by credit or debit card, contact your card issuer and ask to dispute the charge β this is exactly why paying by card matters. Change any password you reused on the checkout, and keep screenshots of the order, the listing, and any messages. Then report it: the FTC in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, or your national consumer-protection body. Reporting won't always recover your money, but it's how these domains eventually get taken down for the next person.
Related guides
- How to spot a fake URL β the look-alike domains scam stores hide behind.
- How to reverse image search β the full method for tracing stolen product photos.
- How to spot fake reviews β telling planted five-star reviews from real ones.
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