Ariat.cloud is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at exceptionally cheap prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is in fact 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, inferior or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will demonstrate the warning signs regarding the Ariat.cloud site, the way this deception operates, and explain how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in upcoming times.
Ariat.cloud Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Ariat.cloud may initially seem like a authentic discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and user reviews – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Ariat.cloud |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.18.10.21 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Ariat.cloud Scam
By purchasing on pages like Ariat.cloud, it is questionable that you will get the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 situations characteristic for scam sites.
Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to fraudulent items of popular brands, the standard will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may inform about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a particularly often case when ordering from sites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the deal look real, but spend even less money on the actual item, frauds may ship a random item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most usual scenario when ordering items from websites like Ariat.cloud. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting effort creating even a remote semblance of legitimacy.
Ariat.cloud scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Ariat.cloud follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post massive amounts of promotions on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 legitimate, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially convincing during major events that boost people’s interest in shopping, like Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, etc. Sometimes, they disguise themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.
Step 2 – Take the Money. Once users are on the website, swindlers do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discounts, free delivery, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed individuals stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.
Payments are done in a strange manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, scammers 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 swindlers, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.
Step 3 – Vanish. Once swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback about the site being fraudulent, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people know about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.
Why is Ariat.cloud a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the fraud site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent 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
Scam sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit shopping sites will lack buyer opinions shortly after the start, since there were only a few 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, when you face phishy-looking reviews that have nothing to do with what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any vague or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam 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 feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, deceptive sites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be ludicrous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its sensible limits.
3. No customer support.
This is what distinguishes deceptive sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam 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 site will most likely have no contact info at all.
Typically for fraudulent websites, the “About us” column is completely empty
When they offer a contact email, or even a phone number to contact them, there is a huge chance that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your question.
As scammers tend to reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, 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 sites 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 whole lot of legit services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what makes it so attractive to scammers – once you’ve sent the money, nothing will help you to get the money back.
Some sites may also offer payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scams.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As rascals are unlikely to have any goods on hand, they cannot shoot unique pics. Thus their option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When frauds sell the same goods on different sites, you can find same images on similarly-looking scam pages. By reverse image searching on Google, you can prove the uniqueness of an image.
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 scammers may scam people on the same topic again and again, they reuse the same site design under the new address, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to uncover such frauds pretty easy, but criminals who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
