How to Spot a Fake Online Store: The 7-Step Legitimacy Checklist

A fake online store can be told apart from a real one in about ten minutes, if you know where to look. Check who registered the domain and when, find the legal entity behind the shop, compare prices with the market, look at how they want to be paid, read the return policy, search for reviews that the shop doesn't control, and send one question to support before you order. A shop that fails two of those seven checks is not worth the discount.

The scale of the problem is not small. In 2025 the FTC logged more than 419,000 reports about online shopping fraud, the second most reported fraud category after imposter scams, with $446 million in reported losses and a median loss of $117 per case (FTC data summarized by Experian). The median matters: most fake shops aren't after one big payout. They collect $80 here and $120 there, from thousands of people, and the site is gone before the first chargeback lands.

Step 1: Check the domain, not the design

Design tells you nothing. Shop templates cost a few dollars, product photos get copied from the brand's own catalogue, and a padlock in the address bar only means the connection is encrypted. Free certificates are issued in minutes to anyone who owns a domain, scam shops included.

The domain record is harder to fake. Run the address through ICANN Lookup and look at two fields: the creation date and the registrant country. A store that claims "serving customers since 2012" on a domain registered six weeks ago has already told you what it is. Registrant details are often hidden behind a privacy service, which is normal on its own, but a hidden registrant plus a very fresh domain plus a brand-name product line at half price is a combination that rarely ends well.

Read the domain itself slowly. Scammers register names that look right at a glance: an extra letter, a hyphen, a different ending (.shop, .store, .top) attached to a brand that only sells on .com. If the shop claims to be an official outlet, open the brand's real site and look for a link to the outlet from there. Brands link to their own stores. They don't rely on you finding them through an Instagram ad.

Step 2: Find the company behind the shop

Somewhere on a real store, usually in the footer, the terms or the imprint, you'll find a legal name, a registered address and a company number. In the EU and the UK that information is required by law for anyone selling online. In the US it's not mandatory, but established retailers publish it anyway because their payment processors and tax authorities already know it.

Take whatever you find and search it. Does the address exist on a map, and is it an office or warehouse rather than a residential flat or a virtual mailbox? Does the company number resolve in the national register (Companies House in the UK, KRS in Poland, the state business search in the US)? Is the same legal name attached to other shops selling completely unrelated goods? That last pattern, one entity behind a watch shop, a garden furniture shop and a pet supplies shop, usually means a dropshipping operation at best and a disposable scam front at worst.

Copy a sentence from the "About us" page and search it in quotes. Fake stores reuse the same backstory across dozens of domains. If the same "family-run business founded by two friends who love quality" shows up on five other sites with five different names, you've found a template, not a company.

Step 3: Price-check against the market, not against the "was" price

Every fake shop uses the same visual trick: a crossed-out high price next to a low one. The crossed-out number is invented, so the discount is meaningless. What matters is the real price of that product elsewhere, today.

Open two or three established retailers and compare. A legitimate discount on current-season branded stock is rarely more than 20 to 40 percent, and deep clearance happens on old models, not on the item that launched last month. A new graphics card, a current iPhone or this season's trainers at 60 to 90 percent off is not a deal. It's bait.

Countdown timers, "only 3 left" badges that reset on refresh, and pop-ups saying someone in your city just bought the same item are pressure tools. Real shops use them too, which is why they aren't proof of anything on their own. Combined with impossible prices, they're part of the same script.

Step 4: Look at how they want to be paid

This is the check that decides whether you can get your money back later, so it deserves a minute of attention.

Card payments and PayPal give you a dispute path. If the goods never arrive, your card issuer can reverse the charge; the mechanics are covered in our guide to chargebacks versus refunds. Bank transfers, cryptocurrency, gift card codes and peer-to-peer apps sent to a private account give you nothing. The money is gone the moment it leaves. The FTC's own testimony to Congress in 2026 lists bank payments as the method behind the highest aggregate fraud losses, followed by cryptocurrency (FTC testimony, March 2026).

Red flags at checkout:

• Card option listed, but it "fails" and the shop suggests a transfer instead. Walk away. That failure is scripted.
• A payment page on a different domain with no name you recognize. Real processors (Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Klarna) are identifiable.
• Requests for a photo of your card or ID "for verification". No legitimate retailer needs that to sell you a jacket.
• Prices quoted in one currency, charged in another, with a processor located somewhere unrelated to the shop's claimed country.

Step 5: Read the policies they'd rather you skip

Scroll to the returns and shipping pages. You're looking for specifics: a returns address, a stated window, who pays return postage, how refunds are issued and how long they take. A real shop has to handle returns every day, so the page reads like something written by people who've done it.

Fake shops either have no returns page, or one copied from a generator: vague, no address, "contact us for details". Shipping pages are similar. "Delivery in 7 to 30 business days" with no carrier named usually means the item, if it exists at all, ships from a dropshipping warehouse the shop has never seen.

Check the contact page as well. A contact form and a Gmail address is not a company. A legitimate shop lists an email on its own domain, often a phone number, and a physical address that matches the one in step 2.

Step 6: Check reviews off-site, not on-site

Testimonials on the shop's own pages carry no weight. The shop wrote them, or picked them, or bought them. The only reviews worth reading are the ones the shop can't edit.

Search the domain on WebVouch. A profile shows the overall rating, how many reviews feed into it, how they split between one-star and five-star, whether the business has claimed the profile, and the same for the company's Trustpilot history where one exists. Reviews published on WebVouch are verified before going live and can't be removed or edited by the business afterwards, which is the property you want when you're trying to find out what happened to people who paid before you.

Three things to read for:

• No profile anywhere, on any review platform, for a shop that claims to be busy. Real stores with real customers leave traces.
• A cluster of five-star reviews posted within the same week, often with similar phrasing, followed by silence. That's a purchased batch.
• One-star reviews that describe the same sequence: order confirmed, tracking number that never updates, support stops replying. One such review could be bad luck. Ten is the business model.

Then look at the shop's social accounts. Account creation date, follower count against engagement, whether comments are turned off, whether complaints under ads get deleted. A store that only exists through ads on TikTok and Instagram deserves the extra checks in our guide to buying from social media ads.

Step 7: Test the humans

Before you order, ask support something specific: whether a product is in stock, what carrier they ship with to your country, how a return works. Then watch what comes back.

A real shop answers within a business day or two, in a way that addresses your question. A fake shop either never replies, replies with a template that ignores what you asked, or replies instantly from a chatbot with no path to a person. If a phone number is listed, call it. A disconnected line or a voicemail that never calls back closes the case.

One more check that costs nothing: paste the domain into the Wayback Machine. A shop that was a Chinese electronics outlet in 2024, a furniture store in 2025 and now sells designer handbags has been recycled.

If you already paid

Order matters here, because some of these steps have deadlines.

1. Dispute the payment. Contact your card issuer or PayPal the same day you conclude the shop is fake. Don't wait for the "30 business days" shipping window to run out; that window exists to push you past the dispute deadline.
2. Change the password if you reused it anywhere else. Fake shops harvest credentials as a side business.
3. Watch the card. A card number given to a scam shop should be treated as compromised. Most issuers will replace it on request.
4. Report it. In the US at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, in the UK through Action Fraud, in the EU through your national consumer authority. Reports rarely get your money back, but they get domains taken down faster.
5. Leave a review on WebVouch. It's the one step that helps the next person who runs the same search you should have run.