Shopify and fraudulent websites

Materialist

I have spent literally hours trying to get a fraudulent website (zestbeauty.com) taken down.  The site is on Shopify and they have done nothing.  How can they get away with hosting these websites.

The site was also reported to:

Gov fraud sites in UK, USA, Au
Google

Cloudflare
123 Reg (Godaddy)
Instagram
Facebook

Not a single tech company has taken action, while the site is still live and taking payments without delivering goods.  People are still getting scammed daily looking at Trust piolet.

What else can be done?  

Ergates

Tech companies aren't going to take action to block a website on your say so.   How do they know you're not just a crooked businessman trying to get a competitor taken down?

eskbanker

Surely there isn't such a thing as a 'fraudulent website' as such but the website of a company believed to operate fraudulently, so I wouldn't have thought there's much value in pursuing them via tech companies, etc - surely you'd need to be reporting the company itself to Trading Standards or whatever?

born_again

Given the number that pop up over christmas on Shopify platform. They could certainly do more to check that they are genuine companies, listed at the address given.

One thing that will help is the more people that claim the money back vis chargebacks will see their merchant bank pull the plug on them.

Although in this case it appears that it could be a name takeover, due to the name & address is a dissolved co from 2020.

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10641087

Materialist

eskbanker said:

Surely there isn't such a thing as a 'fraudulent website' as such but the website of a company believed to operate fraudulently, so I wouldn't have thought there's much value in pursuing them via tech companies, etc - surely you'd need to be reporting the company itself to Trading Standards or whatever?

These sites operate from outside the UK, Trading Standards wouldn't do anything 

Materialist

born_again said:

Given the number that pop up over christmas on Shopify platform. They could certainly do more to check that they are genuine companies, listed at the address given.

After researching this, a BBC article report 21% of all their websites on the platform are scam sites. It's totally insane that you can so easily set up an ecom site and take payments that easily

eskbanker

Materialist said:

eskbanker said:

Surely there isn't such a thing as a 'fraudulent website' as such but the website of a company believed to operate fraudulently, so I wouldn't have thought there's much value in pursuing them via tech companies, etc - surely you'd need to be reporting the company itself to Trading Standards or whatever?

These sites operate from outside the UK, Trading Standards wouldn't do anything 

Yes, you'd need to identify the equivalent wherever the company is operating, but whether you go down that route or via Shopify, all you can really do is to report a verifiable issue with a specific transaction and hope that enough others do the same, i.e. you can't simply accuse a company of scamming and expect it to be taken offline from one report.

born_again

It does not help that 
Shopify Inc., a Canadian corporation, with offices located at 151 O’Connor Street, Ground floor, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2L8.