SCAM - boots and shoes website

Froggitt

So, Mrs Frog asked me to find another pair of her boots, which are well worn and no longer made by the manufacturer. I used google, and came across this website...

http://www.acneaid.co.uk/

...which had her boots at a very good price.

I thought I would share some of the indicators of a scam.

- co.uk domain, but prices end in 61p and the like, doesn't appear like a UK company
- £10.61 shipping to GB, another indicator its not a UK company
- http://www.acneaid.co.uk/checkout_payment.html - this page where you enter your card details is not a secure page, indicative of them harvesting credit card numbers
- Trustwave logo and "click to validate" doesn't click, it should return a "last tested date" of today or similar verification
- The large bottom banner "Why shop with us?" with no reasons given to do so
- No evidence of who owns the website on the website
- http://www.acneaid.co.uk/shippinginfo.html - poor spelling, poor grammar, poor use of English
- http://www.acneaid.co.uk/privacy.html - poor spelling, poor grammar, poor use of English
- logo "Invisible Shoes" does not match the domain name
- http://www.acneaid.co.uk/2016-fashion-mens-john-deere-11-inch-briar-wp-wellington-briar-full-grain-le-fkbd041d1ihh-p-149.html infeasible number of units of stock (1203) with most styles having over a thousand in stock
- pretty much the same site at http://www.kapaikiwi.co.nz/ everything here seems to have 600-700 units in stock
- site appears to have disappeared for almost a year, previous incarnation sold spot products https://web.archive.org/web/20160418145042/http://www.acneaid.co.uk/
- similar here https://web.archive.org/web/20160806221732/http://kapaikiwi.co.nz/
- Scamadvisor gave it 95% safe which is worrying http://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/acneaid.co.uk however it gave me a lead to "Owner: Novofolha Limited"
- Novofolha Limited was dissolved https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08476895
- there is a contact email on the nz site juney.service@hotmail.com - putting this into google comes up with a whole load of scam reports going back a number of years. http://www.garagedoorstaupo.co.nz/ is another site. Note this email address isnt on the co.uk site. Some chatter about fakes from China on various discussion boards.


The scam appears to use domain names with some previous reputation in order to gain ranking from google and reputation from Scamadvisor. There is no evidence to suggest the previous owner of the domain has anything to do with this scam.

There should be some control on who can register .co.uk domain names e.g. a registered UK company, verification via electoral roll etc.

DO NOT BUY ANYTHING ON ANY OF THESE SITES and ensure you do the research before buying stuff from a site you have never used before.

PearlSaunders

So we need to put those addresses into the blacklist, thanks for share

kwikbreaks

Froggitt wrote: »

- http://www.acneaid.co.uk/checkout_payment.html - this page where you enter your card details is not a secure page, indicative of them harvesting credit card numbers

Don't run away with the idea that an HTTPS page means the details are safe once they reach a site. HTTPS only encypts data in transit - the recipient gets the data in clear.

Browsers should soon all be picking up on logins and banking detail entries which are not encrypted and giving warnings. The MSE login has been mentioned already as insecure.

agrinnall

Froggitt wrote: »

There should be some control on who can register .co.uk domain names e.g. a registered UK company, verification via electoral roll etc.

No there shouldn't. What should happen is for people to learn to do what you have done in order to spot dodgy sites wherever they are registered.

shaun_from_Africa

Froggitt wrote: »

There should be some control on who can register .co.uk domain names e.g. a registered UK company, verification via electoral roll etc.

With the amount of money made by some of these scam sites, I'm sure that the website owners would find it easy enough to find a way around any verification checks and the only people that would suffer would be the totally honest company owners who end up paying more when registering a company.

Froggitt

agrinnall wrote: »

No there shouldn't. What should happen is for people to learn to do what you have done in order to spot dodgy sites wherever they are registered.

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

With the amount of money made by some of these scam sites, I'm sure that the website owners would find it easy enough to find a way around any verification checks and the only people that would suffer would be the totally honest company owners who end up paying more when registering a company.

But it puts another hurdle in the way of the scammers, such that they might bypass co.uk and move onto Belgium or Norway or somewhere else that doesn't put obstacles in their way.