Investigating Booksstoreus.shop: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Booksstoreus.shop is a fraudulent website that offers to buy books at extremely low prices. It may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a ploy to make you think this site is legitimate. After ordering from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will highlight the red flags regarding the Booksstoreus.shop site, the way this deception operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in future.

Booksstoreus.shop Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Booksstoreus.shop may initially look like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer testimonials – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Booksstoreus.shop Scam

By purchasing items on sites like Booksstoreus.shop, it is doubtful that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More typically, it results in one of 3 scenarios typical 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 standard 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 notably often case when ordering from pages that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the deal look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may ship a accidental item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn really inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent situation when ordering items from sites like Booksstoreus.shop. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely vanish. As scam sites are not going to exist for a long time, frauds do not bother themselves with creating even a vague visibility of legitimacy.

Booksstoreus.shop scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Booksstoreus.shop runs 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. Frauds post massive amounts of promotions on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly the same things as the websites do: 90% discounts, free delivery around the world, hurry up to get the deal.

Ads of fraudulent shops posted on different platforms

As users deem ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not doubt 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 disguise themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once consumers are on the website, deceivers do their best to make the customers 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 users 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, deceivers 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 tricksters get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback about the site being fraudulent, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people are aware about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Booksstoreus.shop a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the hoax site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is deceptive without risking your money. Fortunately, rascals 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 websites 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 consumer comments shortly after the start, as there were only a few clients yet. For that reason, this sign is not stand-alone and requires confirmation by other signs or indicators.

Definitely not generic comments generated by AI

However, when you face phishy-looking reviews that have no relation to what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent websites 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% discounts are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, fraudulent websites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be preposterous, 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 sensible limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes dishonest websites from the legit ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the clients, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the page will likely have no support contacts whatsoever.

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

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

As scoundrels tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a totally different website, 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 complementary, as there are plenty of benign shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. 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 paid for the order, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some websites may also offer payments in cryptocurrency, which feature even less control. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scammers.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As rascals most likely don’t have any real items, they are not able to create unique images. Thus their only option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When scams market the same goods on different pages, you can find such pics on similarly-looking fraudulent sites. By searching for the image 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

Frauds do not steal only pictures. As scammers may parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they use the same web design under the new web-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 makes uncovering such frauds particularly easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Booksstoreus.shop Scam