Cogiowl.store Scam Store: A Fake GEOX Website

Cogiowl.store is a scam website that offers to purchase various goods from GEOX at extremely low prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact just a story to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering 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 Cogiowl.store shop, the way this fraud operates, and explain how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.

Cogiowl.store Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Cogiowl.store may initially seem like a legit discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, absence of customer support and customer reviews – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Cogiowl.store Scam

By purchasing items on pages like Cogiowl.store, it is questionable that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 cases standard 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 quality 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 notably often case when ordering from websites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the purchase look legit, but spend even less money on the actual item, scammers may send a random item they have instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most typical situation when ordering items from sites like Cogiowl.store. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scam websites do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a faint semblance of legitimacy.

Cogiowl.store scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Cogiowl.store follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It usually consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post abundant amounts of advertisements on online platforms, 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms genuine, 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 mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once consumers are on the website, tricksters do their best to make the customers buy something. Impossibly good 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 individuals 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, 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 deceivers, “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 reports 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 people know about the deceptive activity, the profits will dry up, leaving swindlers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Cogiowl.store 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, 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

Hoax websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any online reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, as 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 offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure or drivel reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest 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% reductions are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, dishonest sites 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 for cheap, but every sell-off has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes deceptive websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the buyers, 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 at all.

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

When they offer an email, or even a phone to contact them, there is a great chance that these contacts will be dead silent 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 are used on a different website, be sure that this is 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 legit shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has the same feature 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’ve sent the money, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some websites may also offer 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 fraudsters.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they are not able to make unique pictures. Thus their option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When rascals sell the same items on different websites, you can find same pics on similarly-designed scam pages. By searching for the image 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

This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As rascals may scam people on the same topic repeatedly, they put the same web design under the new web-address, and voila – a new scam 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 makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but scammers who create them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Cogiowl.store Scam