Coconuts.bio is a fraudulent website that offers to buy flowers 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 about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering goods 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 Coconuts.bio store, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.
Coconuts.bio Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Coconuts.bio may initially look like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, absence of user support and user reviews – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Coconuts.bio |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.18.12.130 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Coconuts.bio Scam
By purchasing items on websites like Coconuts.bio, it is questionable that you will receive the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 cases common 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 mention 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 websites that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the trade look real, but spend even less money on the actual item, rascals may send a accidental item they have instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dented aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most usual case when ordering items from websites like Coconuts.bio. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scam sites are not going to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a slight visibility of legitimacy.
Coconuts.bio scam – How does it work?
As any fraud, Coconuts.bio 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. Scammers post huge amounts of advertisements on online platforms, 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 particularly compelling 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 individuals are on the site, tricksters do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discounts, free shipping, 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 unusual manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, swindlers 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 crooks get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback regarding 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 are aware about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Coconuts.bio a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent without risking your money. Fortunately, scammers 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 online reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, 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 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% discounts are not trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, dishonest sites have the initial price 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 at a low price, but every sell-off has its logical limits.
3. No customer support.
That factor distinguishes fraudulent sites from the benign 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 (if it is present at all) – the site will have no contact info whatsoever.
Typically for fraudulent websites, 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 emails and numbers will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.
As scammers often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a completely different site, be sure you are 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 lot of legit services 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 sites may also offer payments in crypto, which feature even less control. 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 rascals are unlikely to have any goods, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their option is to steal these images elsewhere. When scams sell the same goods on different websites, you can find same images 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
Frauds do not steal only photos. As rascals may use the same topic again and again, they put the same site design under the new 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 original site. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but crooks who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
