Bonheurvivant.club is a scam website that offers to purchase items at exceptionally cheap prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. Upon ordering from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will demonstrate the warning signs regarding the Bonheurvivant.club store, the way this fraud operates, and explain how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in upcoming times.
Bonheurvivant.club Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Bonheurvivant.club may initially look like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of customer support and user reviews – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.
| Website | Bonheurvivant.club |
| Hosting | AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. United States, San Jose |
| IP Address | 52.52.120.29 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Bonheurvivant.club Scam
By shopping on websites like Bonheurvivant.club, it is questionable that you will acquire the items 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 fake items of popular brands, the attribute will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may notify about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a specifically common case when ordering from pages that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the transaction look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the actual item, cheats may ship a accidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a scratched aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most usual case when ordering goods from sites like Bonheurvivant.club. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scam sites do not aim to exist for a long time, frauds are not wasting time creating even a remote sight of legitimacy.
Bonheurvivant.club scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Bonheurvivant.club runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It usually consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post massive amounts of marketing on social media, 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 site, tricksters 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 strange 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 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 reports regarding the site being a scam, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers know about the fraudulent activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Bonheurvivant.club 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, fraudsters 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 reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack customer reviews shortly after the start, since there were not many customers 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 unclear or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam websites you will get an entire saltcellar. Do not hesitate searching 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 Black Friday. In some cases, deceptive websites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be outrageous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every sell-off has its rational limits.
3. No customer support.
That factor distinguishes dishonest websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the clients, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page (if it is present at all) – the page will most likely have no contact info at all.
Typically for fraudulent sites, the “About us” column is completely empty
When they offer a contact email, or even a phone to reach them out, there is a huge chance that these emails and numbers will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.
As frauds often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a 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 complementary, as there are plenty of trustworthy shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have the same pitfall I’ve already mentioned above: these methods do not suppose any refund options. 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 crypto payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scammers.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As scammers most likely don’t have any goods, they are not able to create unique pics. Thus their option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When rascals sell identical goods on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking scam 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
Rascals do not copy only pics. As rascals may use the same topic repeatedly, they use the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the original site. It allows you to unveil such scams particularly easy, but scoundrels who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
