Investigating Getortholuxe.com: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Getortholuxe.com is a scam website that offers to buy leather bags and purses at exceptionally cheap 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 this site is legitimate. 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 highlight the red flags regarding the Getortholuxe.com site, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Getortholuxe.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Getortholuxe.com may initially appear like a legit discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer reviews – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Getortholuxe.com Scam

By shopping on sites like Getortholuxe.com, it is unlikely that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More often, 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 grade will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may notify about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a specifically common case when ordering from sites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the trade look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may send a random item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a scratched aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most typical scenario when ordering items from sites like Getortholuxe.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, fraudsters are not wasting time creating even a remote sight of legitimacy.

Getortholuxe.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Getortholuxe.com runs a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post abundant amounts of advertisements on online platforms, 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 legitimate, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 customers are on the website, fraudsters do their best to make the individuals 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 individuals stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.

Payments are done in a quirky 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 tricksters, “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 reports regarding the site being a scam, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers know about the deceptive activity, the profits will dry up, leaving crooks with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Getortholuxe.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the hoax 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

Scam sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, as there were not many 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, once you face unrealistic reviews that have no relation to what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest websites 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% discounts are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, deceptive websites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be preposterous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes scam websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam 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 have no contact info whatsoever.

Typically for fraudulent sites, the “About us” column is completely empty

When they offer an email, or even a phone number to reach them out, there is a huge chance that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with 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 appear on a 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 genuine shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has 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 sites may also ask for payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams most likely don’t have any goods on hand, they cannot create unique pics. Thus their option is to steal these images from other websites. When scams offer identical goods on different sites, you can find such pics on similarly-designed scam sites. 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 scammers may parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same site design under the new web-address, and voila – a new scam 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 page you’ve started on. It allows you to uncover such frauds pretty easy, but scammers who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Is your PC infected?

There are cases when Getortholuxe.com website, together with similar scam pages, are promoted by malware. Adware and browser hijackers are two particular malware types known for such behavior. If you notice excessive ads in your web browser, see your search inquiries redirected in a different search engine and some random pages open time to time, scan your computer with GridinSoft Anti-Malware. This will help you to get rid of annoying promotions and scam sites.

Remove malware with Gridinsoft Anti-Malware

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Frequently Asked Questions about the Getortholuxe.com Scam