How to spot a fake online store before you pay

A fake online store takes your money and ships nothing, or ships something far worse than advertised. They often reach you through social media ads and search results, and AI site builders have made them faster to set up and better looking than ever. The good news: they still fail a few simple checks, and most take under a minute.

1. The price is too good

Discounts of 70 to 90 percent on items that are in demand everywhere else (popular trainers, branded electronics, designer bags, the toy everyone wants this winter) are the clearest sign of a fake shop. So are pressure tactics: countdown timers that reset when you reload, "only 2 left" on every item, and "closing down, everything must go" banners on a shop that just opened.

2. The address and its age

• Read the domain. A brand name plus words like outlet, official-store or sale, or an unusual ending like .shop or .store with a big brand's name, deserves suspicion. Brands sell from their own domains.
• Check the age. Search "whois" plus the domain and look at the creation date. Scam shops are often weeks old, because they are reported and replaced quickly.
• Check the hosting. A "brand store" on an AI builder's free domain, like *.lovable.app or *.bolt.host, is not the brand.

3. Reverse-search a product photo

Right-click a product image and search for it with Google Lens or another reverse image search. If the same photo appears on the brand's own site, on dozens of other shops or on marketplaces at normal prices, the shop probably took it without owning any stock.

4. Who is behind it?

• A company name, a physical address you can find on a map, and a phone number.
• Returns and shipping policies that name that company. Copy a sentence and search it in quotes; scam shops paste the same text across many sites.
• Placeholders nobody filled in: [Company Name], 123 Main Street, Lorem ipsum.
• Social media links that go to empty or unrelated profiles.

5. Reviews from somewhere else

Ignore reviews on the shop itself. Search for the shop's name with "reviews" or "scam" and read independent review sites and forums. A shop that claims thousands of happy customers but has no footprint outside its own pages isn't telling the truth.

6. How it wants to be paid

Pay only with a credit card or a well-known payment service that offers buyer protection, so you can dispute the charge. Walk away if the shop:

• Only takes bank transfer, crypto, gift cards or friends-and-family payment apps
• Offers an extra discount for paying one of those ways
• Sends you to a checkout page on a different, unrelated domain

Why AI builders changed the picture

Scam shops used to give themselves away with clumsy design and broken English. AI app builders and AI-written copy fixed both. A fake shop can now have a clean layout, product descriptions in fluent marketing language and a convincing about page, all generated in minutes. That's why the checks above focus on things a design can't fake: the domain's age, the price, the payment method and the evidence outside the site.

How a shop was built can still add context. A brand-name store on a builder's free hosting, with an untouched template title and stock AI copy, is worth extra caution. See how to tell if a website was made with AI.

If you already paid

1. Call your card issuer or bank straight away and ask about a chargeback or payment dispute.
2. Keep screenshots of the product page, your order confirmation and any emails.
3. Change any password you created on the shop if you reused it elsewhere.
4. Report the shop. Our guide on how to report a phishing website covers where.

Kitsuvo, our no-AI web browser, shows how every shop you open was built and filters likely AI-built results out of your searches. For a general checklist, read how to check if a website is legit.