Analyzing Lacosteoutletsonline.com: Should You Trust It? Our Take

Lacosteoutletsonline.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted prices. This site 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 most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the concerning indicators regarding the Lacosteoutletsonline.com shop, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in future.

Lacosteoutletsonline.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Lacosteoutletsonline.com 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 say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, extremely low prices, lack of customer support and customer testimonials – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Lacosteoutletsonline.com Scam

By purchasing items on sites like Lacosteoutletsonline.com, it is doubtful that you will receive the items you’ve ordered. More typically, it results in one of 3 situations standard 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 quality 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 notably often case when ordering from pages that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

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

Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent situation when ordering items from pages like Lacosteoutletsonline.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, rascals do not bother themselves with creating even a vague sight of legitimacy.

Lacosteoutletsonline.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Lacosteoutletsonline.com 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. Frauds post massive amounts of promotions on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially convincing 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 consumers are on the site, deceivers do their best to make the users 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 individuals 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, swindlers 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 crooks get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user reports regarding the site being a scam, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers are aware about the dishonest activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Lacosteoutletsonline.com 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, fraudsters 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

Fraud 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 consumer comments 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 obscure or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on deceptive websites 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 trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, dishonest websites have the initial price 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 sell-off has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes dishonest sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam the buyers, 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 have no support contacts whatsoever.

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

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone number to contact them, there is a great chance that these emails and numbers will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.

As scammers often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned 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 complementary, as there are a lot of benign shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have the same pitfall I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what attracts scammers – once you’ve sent the money, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some sites may also offer payments in cryptocurrency, 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 frauds are unlikely to have any items on hand, they are not able to make unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images from other websites. When rascals sell the same goods on different pages, 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

This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As scammers may scam people on the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same web design under the new address, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the copy of the site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but scoundrels who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Lacosteoutletsonline.com Scam