Investigating Cheerfulxmas.com: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Cheerfulxmas.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at extremely low prices. It 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. After 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 show the concerning indicators regarding the Cheerfulxmas.com store, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.

Cheerfulxmas.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Cheerfulxmas.com may initially seem like a authentic discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, absence of user support and user feedback – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.

Cheerfulxmas.com Scam

By shopping on websites like Cheerfulxmas.com, it is unlikely that you will receive the goods you’ve ordered. More typically, it results in one of 3 situations typical for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to counterfeit items of popular brands, the grade 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 frequent case when ordering from pages that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

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

Nothing at all. This is the most common outcome when ordering from pages like Cheerfulxmas.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, frauds are not wasting time creating even a slight semblance of legitimacy.

Cheerfulxmas.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Cheerfulxmas.com follows 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 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 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 mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once individuals are on the site, scammers do their best to make the consumers buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discount promo codes, free delivery, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed customers 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, fraudsters 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 scammers, “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 reports regarding the site being fraudulent, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals are aware about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving swindlers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Cheerfulxmas.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

Scam websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack client testimonials shortly after the start, as there were not many clients 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 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 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% markdowns are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, deceptive 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 sell-off has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes dishonest websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the customers, 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 site will most likely have no contact info whatsoever.

Typically for fraudulent sites, 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 emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.

As scammers often reuse numbers and emails 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 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 services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have 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’ve sent the money, nothing will help you to get the money back.

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

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their option is simply to hijack these images from other sites. When crooks offer the same goods on different pages, you can find same images 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 stop on stealing pictures. As frauds may parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same web 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 I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but scammers who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Cheerfulxmas.com Scam