Adeline-marseille.com Scam Store: What You Need To Know

Adeline-marseille.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy items at exceptionally cheap prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is actually just a story to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. Upon ordering goods from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the red flags regarding the Adeline-marseille.com store, the way this scam operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in future.

Adeline-marseille.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Adeline-marseille.com may initially seem like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of customer support and user testimonials – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.

Adeline-marseille.com Scam

By shopping on pages like Adeline-marseille.com, it is doubtful that you will obtain the goods you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 instances characteristic for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to imitation items of popular brands, the attribute will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may mention about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a particularly frequent case when ordering from sites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may send a random item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent case when ordering goods from websites like Adeline-marseille.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, rascals are not wasting effort creating even a remote semblance of legitimacy.

Adeline-marseille.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Adeline-marseille.com follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post massive amounts of marketing on online platforms, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly the same things as their sites do: 90% discounts, free delivery around the world, hurry up to get the deal.

Ads of fraudulent shops posted on different platforms

As users regard ads on the mentioned platforms genuine, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become especially persuasive during major events that boost people’s interest in shopping, like Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, etc. Sometimes, they mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once individuals are on the website, fraudsters do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discount promo codes, free shipping, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed consumers stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.

Payments are done in a peculiar manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, tricksters offer using direct bank transfers, Venmo or CashApp. Thing is, the latter do not provide any refunds, regardless of the circumstances. Even when you can prove that the transaction went to tricksters, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once scoundrels get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user feedback regarding the site being fraudulent, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people are aware about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving swindlers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Adeline-marseille.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is deceptive without risking your money. Fortunately, frauds do not bother themselves with creating well-rounded disguises, so the same red flags repeat from one site to another.

1. Fake or absent reviews

Fraud sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack client testimonials shortly after the start, since there were not many consumers yet. For that reason, this sign is not stand-alone and must be confirmed with other signs or indicators.

Definitely not generic comments generated by AI

However, once you face phishy-looking reviews that have nothing to do with what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent sites you will get an entire saltcellar. Always search for reviews on Google – this may save your money.

2. Unbelievably high discounts/low prices

No merchants will sell goods at loss for themselves. 70%, 80%, 90% reductions are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, fraudulent sites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be absurd, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold at a low price, but every discount has its reasonable limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes deceptive sites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the customers, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page (if it is present at all) – the page will have no support contacts whatsoever.

Typically for fraudulent websites, the “About us” column is completely empty

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone to contact them, there is a great possibility that these contacts will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scoundrels often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a totally different site, be sure you’re facing a blatant scam.

A chain of scam websites that use the same “support email”

4. Payments via payment systems that does not support refunds

This scam indicator is not a guarantee, as there are a lot of legit services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has the same pitfall I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what makes it so attractive to scammers – once you paid for the order, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some websites may also ask for payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers are unlikely to have any real items, they cannot shoot unique pictures. Thus their option is simply to hijack these images elsewhere. When rascals market the same items on different pages, you can find same images on similarly-designed fraudulent pages. By reverse image searching on Google, you can prove whether the image is unique or not.

Image duplicates on another scam site, as well as on Amazon and Walmart sites

6. Design repeats the one of a different page

This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As rascals may use the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same site design under the new address, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such frauds particularly easy, but crooks who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Is your PC infected?

There are situations when Adeline-marseille.com website, together with similar scam sites, are promoted by malware. Adware and browser hijackers are two particular malware types that aim specifically at such purposes. If you notice excessive ads appearing in your web browser, see your search queries redirected in an unusual search engine and some random pages open time to time, scan your computer with GridinSoft Anti-Malware. This will help you to get rid of annoying promotions and scam sites.

Remove malware with Gridinsoft Anti-Malware

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Frequently Asked Questions about the Adeline-marseille.com Scam