Intrinsici.com Scam Store: A Fake Online Shop

Intrinsici.com is a scam 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 story to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. 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 show the red flags regarding the Intrinsici.com shop, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in future.

Intrinsici.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Intrinsici.com may initially appear like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and customer feedback – this site accomplishes the scam bingo right away.

Intrinsici.com Scam

By purchasing items on sites like Intrinsici.com, it is questionable that you will obtain the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 scenarios typical 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 characteristic 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 pages that offer 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, cheats may send a random item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most typical case when ordering items from pages like Intrinsici.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting effort creating even a vague semblance of legitimacy.

Intrinsici.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Intrinsici.com follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become especially 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 consumers buy something. Impossibly good 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 peculiar 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 fraudsters, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once rascals get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback about the site being fraudulent, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals 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 Intrinsici.com 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

Scam websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even legit shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, as there were not many consumers 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 phishy-looking reviews that have nothing to do with what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent 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 viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, dishonest websites 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 discount has its sensible limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes scam sites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the customers, 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 most likely 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 dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As frauds tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a different website, 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 trustworthy services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. Each of the latter has 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’ve sent the money, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some websites may also ask for payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While crypto transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scammers.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds are unlikely to have any goods, they cannot shoot unique images. Thus their only option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When scammers sell identical goods on different websites, you can find same pics on similarly-looking scam pages. 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

Frauds do not stop on stealing pics. As scammers may use the same topic repeatedly, they use the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the page you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams particularly 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 Intrinsici.com Scam