Freewebdsm.life is a deceptive website that offers to buy clothes at unusually discounted prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is actually just a ploy 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 concerning indicators regarding the Freewebdsm.life shop, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.
Freewebdsm.life Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Freewebdsm.life may initially appear like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and user reviews – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Freewebdsm.life |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 188.114.96.3 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Freewebdsm.life Scam
By shopping on websites like Freewebdsm.life, it is doubtful that you will get the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, 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 quality 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 notably frequent case when ordering from pages that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the purchase look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the actual item, scammers may send a random item they have on hand 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 – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.
Absolutely nothing. This is the most typical outcome when ordering from websites like Freewebdsm.life. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, frauds are not wasting effort creating even a faint sight of legitimacy.
Freewebdsm.life scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Freewebdsm.life 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 advertisements 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially 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 individuals are on the website, scammers do their best to make the customers buy something. Impossibly good 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 tricksters get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback 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 deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving scammers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Freewebdsm.life 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, rascals 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 purpose (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack client testimonials when they have just started, since there were just a few buyers 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 markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest sites 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% reductions are not trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, scam websites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be ridiculous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every sell-off has its sane limits.
3. No customer support.
This is what distinguishes deceptive 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 – the site will likely 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 chance that these contacts will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.
As scammers tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a different site, be sure you are facing 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 benign services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. 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 paid for the order, nothing will help you 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 fraudsters.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As scammers most likely don’t have any items, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their only option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When scams sell the same items on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-designed scam 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 use the same site design under the new web-address, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search on Google advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It allows you to uncover such frauds pretty easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
