Is Emiratesmalls.com A Scam? The Hard Facts You Need To Know

Emiratesmalls.com is a scam website that offers to buy items at exceptionally cheap prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a story to make you think this site is legitimate. After placing an order on this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will highlight the red flags regarding the Emiratesmalls.com site, the way this deception operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.

Emiratesmalls.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Emiratesmalls.com may initially look like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer feedback – this site accomplishes the scam bingo right away.

Emiratesmalls.com Scam

By purchasing on pages like Emiratesmalls.com, it is uncertain that you will acquire the goods you’ve ordered. More typically, 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 imitation items of popular brands, the characteristic will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may indicate about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a notably frequent case when ordering from sites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the deal look real, but spend even less money on the delivered item, frauds may send a random item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dirty aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most common scenario when ordering goods from websites like Emiratesmalls.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then just disappear. As scam sites are not going to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a remote semblance of legitimacy.

Emiratesmalls.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Emiratesmalls.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 huge amounts of promotions 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 legitimate, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become especially persuasive 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, fraudsters do their best to make the customers buy something. Impossibly good 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 individuals 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, 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user feedback regarding the site being fraudulent, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers are aware about the deceptive activity, the money flow 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 Emiratesmalls.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 untrustworthy 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

Hoax websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with feedback. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack buyer opinions when they have just started, as there were just a few customers 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 nothing to do with what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or drivel reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on deceptive 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% reductions are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, fraudulent websites 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 for cheap, but every discount has its logical 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 customers, 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 contact them, there is a great possibility that these contacts will be dead silent to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

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 completely different site, 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 not a guarantee, as there are a whole lot of trustworthy 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 paid for the order, nothing will help you to get the money back.

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

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers most likely don’t have any real items, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their only option is to steal these images from other sites. When crooks sell identical goods on different websites, you can find such images on similarly-designed scam sites. By reverse image searching 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

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 site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but criminals who create them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Emiratesmalls.com Scam