Ikeaclearance.club is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted prices. It may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is in fact just a narrative to make you think this site is legitimate. Upon ordering goods 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 Ikeaclearance.club site, the way this deception operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.
Ikeaclearance.club Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Ikeaclearance.club may initially appear like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, lack of user support and customer testimonials – this site completes the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Ikeaclearance.club |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.18.24.121 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Ikeaclearance.club Scam
By purchasing items on websites like Ikeaclearance.club, it is improbable that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 situations common for scam sites.
Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to fake items of popular brands, the standard will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may inform about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a particularly common case when ordering from sites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the transaction look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may send a random item they have instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most typical scenario when ordering from sites like Ikeaclearance.club. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scam sites do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a faint sight of legitimacy.
Ikeaclearance.club scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Ikeaclearance.club follows 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. Scammers post massive amounts of advertisements on online platforms, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, 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 customers are on the site, tricksters do their best to make the consumers buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, free shipping, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed users 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback regarding the site being fraudulent, they just vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people are aware about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.
Why is Ikeaclearance.club a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is untrustworthy 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
Hoax 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 legit shopping sites will lack customer reviews shortly after the start, as there were not many patrons 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, when you face unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear 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. 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% reductions are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, fraudulent sites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be absurd, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every sell-off has its rational limits.
3. No customer support.
That factor distinguishes dishonest websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the clients, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page (if it is present at all) – the page will most likely have no support contacts whatsoever.
Typically for fraudulent sites, the “About us” column is completely empty
When they offer a contact email, or even a phone number to reach them out, there is a huge chance that these contacts will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.
As frauds tend to reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a completely different website, be sure you are 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 plenty of benign shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have the same pitfall 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, there’s no way 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 scammers.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As rascals are unlikely to have any real items, they are not able to make unique pics. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When scammers sell identical goods on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-designed fraudulent 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 scammers may use the same topic again and again, they put the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search on Google advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to uncover such scams pretty easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
