Lightfootballofficial.deals is a scam website that offers to purchase items at unusually discounted prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a story 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 red flags regarding the Lightfootballofficial.deals shop, the way this scam operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in future.
Lightfootballofficial.deals Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Lightfootballofficial.deals may initially look like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and user feedback – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.
| Website | Lightfootballofficial.deals |
| Hosting | AS209242 Cloudflare London, LLC Canada, Toronto |
| IP Address | 216.120.131.66 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Lightfootballofficial.deals Scam
By shopping on pages like Lightfootballofficial.deals, it is doubtful that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 cases characteristic for scam sites.
Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to fraudulent items of popular brands, the characteristic will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may mention about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a notably common 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 delivered item, rascals may send a incidental item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dented aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn quite inventive in that case.
Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent scenario when ordering from sites like Lightfootballofficial.deals. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely vanish. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scams do not bother themselves with creating even a vague visibility of legitimacy.
Lightfootballofficial.deals scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Lightfootballofficial.deals runs 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 promotions 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not doubt 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 site, swindlers do their best to make the customers 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 users stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.
Payments are done in a strange manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, fraudsters 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 scammers, “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 reports regarding the site being fraudulent, they just disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers are aware about the fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Lightfootballofficial.deals 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
Fraud sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack customer reviews shortly after the start, since there were not many patrons 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, when 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 obscure or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent websites 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 Christmas. In some cases, scam websites 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 logical limits.
3. No customer support.
This is what distinguishes deceptive websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud 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 site will likely have no support contacts at all.
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 great possibility that these numbers and emails will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.
As scammers 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 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 legit 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: 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 sites may also ask for payments in crypto, which feature even less control. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scams.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As fraudsters most likely don’t have any real items, they are not able to shoot unique pics. Thus their option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When scammers market identical goods on different pages, you can find same 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
Scammers do not steal only photos. As scammers may use the same topic repeatedly, they put the same web design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such frauds particularly easy, but scoundrels who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
