Guess-us.shop Scam Store: What You Need To Know

Guess-us.shop is a deceptive website that offers to purchase women clothing at extremely low prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact just a narrative to make you think this site is legitimate. After placing an order on this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will highlight the warning signs regarding the Guess-us.shop shop, the way this scam operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.

Guess-us.shop Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Guess-us.shop may initially appear like a legit discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s deception. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and user feedback – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.

Guess-us.shop Scam

By shopping on pages like Guess-us.shop, it is improbable that you will receive the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 situations characteristic 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 attribute 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 websites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, scammers may ship a random item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. A worn t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dented aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most frequent case when ordering from sites like Guess-us.shop. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, rascals are not wasting time creating even a vague sight of legitimacy.

Guess-us.shop scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Guess-us.shop runs 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 huge amounts of marketing 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 suspect 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 disguise themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once consumers are on the website, deceivers do their best to make the consumers buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discount promo codes, free delivery, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed customers 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, 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 tricksters 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 are aware about the fraudulent activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Guess-us.shop 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

Hoax sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack buyer opinions when they have just started, since there were not many 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 offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam 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 viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, fraudulent 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 at a low price, but every discount has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor 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 – the page will 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 reach them out, there is a great possibility that these contacts will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a different site, be sure you’re 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 not a guarantee, as there are a lot of benign 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 makes it so attractive to 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 payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams are unlikely to have any real items, they cannot shoot unique pictures. Thus their only option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When rascals market the same items on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking scam sites. 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

Scammers do not stop on stealing pics. As frauds may scam people on the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same web design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but criminals who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Guess-us.shop Scam