Investigating Homestores.top: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Homestores.top is a scam website that offers to purchase vases 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 ordering from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will highlight the red flags regarding the Homestores.top site, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in upcoming times.

Homestores.top Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Homestores.top may initially look like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Questionable advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and customer feedback – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Homestores.top Scam

By purchasing on pages like Homestores.top, it is uncertain that you will acquire the goods you’ve ordered. More frequently, it results in one of 3 instances typical 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 standard 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 frequent case when ordering from websites 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 accidental item they have 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 – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most frequent situation when ordering items from pages like Homestores.top. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, frauds do not bother themselves with creating even a vague sight of legitimacy.

Homestores.top scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Homestores.top follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post massive amounts of advertisements 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly convincing 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. 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 customers 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, scammers 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 grievances and user feedback about the site being fraudulent, 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 profits will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Homestores.top a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the fraud site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is untrustworthy 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 reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack buyer opinions shortly after the start, 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, once you face phishy-looking reviews that have no relation to what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear or balderdash reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on deceptive 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% markdowns are not trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, dishonest sites have the initial price 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 for cheap, but every sell-off has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes scam 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 page will likely 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 great possibility that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.

As frauds often reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a different website, 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 whole lot of trustworthy shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have the same pitfall 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 transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers most likely don’t have any real items, they cannot shoot unique pics. Thus their option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When rascals sell the same items on different websites, you can find same images on similarly-looking scam sites. By reverse image searching 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 copy only pictures. As rascals may use the same topic again and again, they use the same web 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 from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It allows you to uncover such frauds pretty easy, but crooks who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Homestores.top Scam