Garde.life is a fraudulent website that offers to purchase items at exceptionally cheap prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is in fact just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After placing an order on this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will highlight the concerning indicators regarding the Garde.life site, the way this scam operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.
Garde.life Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Garde.life may initially appear like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer testimonials – this site completes the scam bingo right away.
| Website | Garde.life |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. Canada, Ottawa |
| IP Address | 23.227.38.65 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Garde.life Scam
By purchasing on pages like Garde.life, it is questionable that you will receive the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 cases 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 standard 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 specifically often case when ordering from pages that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the trade look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the delivered item, rascals may ship a incidental item they have on hand instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.
Absolutely nothing. This is the most common scenario when ordering from websites like Garde.life. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, rascals are not wasting effort creating even a slight visibility of legitimacy.
Garde.life scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Garde.life follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It usually consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post abundant amounts of marketing on social media, 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 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, scammers do their best to make the customers buy something. Impossibly good 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 consumers stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.
Payments are done in a unusual 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 fraudsters, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.
Step 3 – Vanish. Once scoundrels get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints 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 people know about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving swindlers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.
Why is Garde.life a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is deceptive 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
Fraud websites 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 customer reviews when they have just started, as there were just a few consumers 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 unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or balderdash reviews that may describe any item sold on the website 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% discounts are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, dishonest sites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be ludicrous, 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 sensible 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 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 site will have no contact info whatsoever.
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 possibility that these emails and numbers will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.
As frauds often reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a totally different site, be sure that this is 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 not a guarantee, as there are a whole lot of genuine 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, nothing will help you to get the money back.
Some websites may also offer payments in crypto, which feature even less control. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As scammers are unlikely to have any real items, they cannot make unique pics. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When crooks market the same items on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-looking 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
Rascals do not stop on stealing photos. As rascals may use the same topic repeatedly, they use the same web design under the new address, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. 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
