Is Clearanceus.com Legit or a Ripoff? Our In-Depth Investigation

Clearanceus.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy items at extremely low 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 likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

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

Clearanceus.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Clearanceus.com may initially appear like a legit discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Unfair advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, absence of customer support and customer testimonials – this site completes the fraud bingo right away.

Clearanceus.com Scam

By purchasing items on pages like Clearanceus.com, it is unlikely that you will obtain the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, 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 standard 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 especially common case when ordering from pages that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look real, but spend even less money on the delivered item, frauds may send a accidental item they have instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn really inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most usual situation when ordering from sites like Clearanceus.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, rascals do not bother themselves with creating even a slight sight of legitimacy.

Clearanceus.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Clearanceus.com runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post abundant 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become especially compelling 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 consumers are on the site, deceivers do their best to make the consumers buy something. Impossibly good 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 consumers stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.

Payments are done in a curious 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 rascals get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user feedback about the site being a scam, they just vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers know about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving scammers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Clearanceus.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the hoax site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is untrustworthy without risking your money. Fortunately, scams 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 reason (and way) to make any reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack consumer comments when they have just started, as there were not many buyers 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, once you face phishy-looking reviews that have no relation to what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent 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 trustworthy 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 preposterous, 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 sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam the clients, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the site will 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 contact them, there is a huge chance that these numbers and emails will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your question.

As frauds often reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, 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 not a guarantee, as there are a whole lot of legit shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has the same pitfall I’ve already mentioned above: these methods do not suppose any refund options. And this is what attracts scammers – once you paid for the order, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some sites may also ask for 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 scammers.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As fraudsters are unlikely to have any goods on hand, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When scammers sell identical goods on different pages, you can find same pics on similarly-designed 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

Scammers do not steal only pictures. As scammers may use the same topic again and again, they put the same site design under the new web-address, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, 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 pretty easy, but scammers who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Clearanceus.com Scam