Freeluigi.com Exposed: Legit or Total Scam? Our Findings

Freeluigi.com is a deceptive website that offers to purchase items at unusually discounted 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 placing an order on this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

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

Freeluigi.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Freeluigi.com may initially look like a genuine 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. Questionable advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, absence of user support and customer reviews – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.

Freeluigi.com Scam

By shopping on pages like Freeluigi.com, it is unlikely that you will receive 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 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 pages that promote 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 ship a incidental item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. A worn 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 frequent scenario when ordering from sites like Freeluigi.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just disappear. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scammers do not bother themselves with creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Freeluigi.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Freeluigi.com 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 massive 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 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 users are on the website, swindlers do their best to make the customers buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discount promo codes, 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 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user reports regarding the site being a scam, they simply vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals know about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving cheats with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Freeluigi.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 fraudulent 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

Hoax sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack user feedback when they have just started, since there were only a few patrons 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 unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear or balderdash reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent 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 trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, fraudulent sites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be outrageous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold at a low price, but every discount has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes fraudulent sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the clients, 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 most likely 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 number to contact them, there is a great chance that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers tend to reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a different website, 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 complementary, as there are a whole lot of trustworthy 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 attracts scammers – once you paid for the order, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some websites 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 scams.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As fraudsters are unlikely to have any items on hand, they are not able to create unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to hijack these images elsewhere. When rascals offer identical goods on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking fraudulent pages. 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 use the same topic again and again, they reuse the same web design under the new address, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the page 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 Freeluigi.com Scam