Flumfloatvapes.com Scam Store: What You Need To Know

Flumfloatvapes.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted 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. After ordering from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will demonstrate the warning signs regarding the Flumfloatvapes.com store, the way this scam operates, and show how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in future.

Flumfloatvapes.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Flumfloatvapes.com may initially appear like a legit discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, absence of user support and user reviews – this site accomplishes the scam bingo right away.

Flumfloatvapes.com Scam

By purchasing on sites like Flumfloatvapes.com, it is improbable that you will get the goods you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 cases characteristic for scam sites.

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

Wrong item. To make the purchase look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may ship a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a scratched aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most common outcome when ordering items from pages like Flumfloatvapes.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scam sites do not aim to exist for a long time, scams do not bother themselves with creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Flumfloatvapes.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Flumfloatvapes.com follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post abundant amounts of promotions on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly the same things as the websites 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 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 customers are on the website, deceivers do their best to make the individuals buy something. Mind-boggling 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 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 swindlers, “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 reports regarding the site being a scam, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people are aware about the fraudulent activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving swindlers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Flumfloatvapes.com 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, fraudsters 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

Fraud sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any reputation with feedback. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, since there were not many consumers 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 unrealistic reviews that have no relation to what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure 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% markdowns are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, fraudulent websites have the initial price 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 reasonable limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes dishonest sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the buyers, 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 page will likely have no support contacts whatsoever.

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

As frauds tend to reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a totally 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 a lot of benign services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what attracts scammers – once you’ve sent the money, 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 cryptocurrency payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As fraudsters most likely don’t have any items on hand, they are not able to create unique pictures. Thus their option is simply to steal these images from other sites. When scams market identical items on different pages, you can find same pics on similarly-looking scam pages. 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

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 site 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 from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the site you’ve started on. 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 Flumfloatvapes.com Scam