LiquidationRetailer.com Under Investigation – Scam or Legit? Read This

LiquidationRetailer.com is a scam website that offers to buy items at exceptionally cheap prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a narrative to make you think this site is legitimate. Upon ordering from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

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

LiquidationRetailer.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, LiquidationRetailer.com may initially look like a authentic discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, absence of user support and customer testimonials – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

LiquidationRetailer.com Scam

By purchasing items on websites like LiquidationRetailer.com, it is uncertain that you will acquire the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, 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 fraudulent items of popular brands, the characteristic 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 notably frequent case when ordering from sites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the purchase look real, but spend even less money on the actual item, cheats may ship a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dirty aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most frequent scenario when ordering goods from pages like LiquidationRetailer.com. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a slight sight of legitimacy.

LiquidationRetailer.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, LiquidationRetailer.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. Scammers post abundant amounts of promotions on online platforms, 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 legitimate, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially persuasive 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, fraudsters do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling 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 peculiar 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 scammers, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once scoundrels get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback regarding the site being fraudulent, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people know about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving scammers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is LiquidationRetailer.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the hoax site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent 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

Scam sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, as there were not many customers 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 unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or balderdash 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 trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, fraudulent websites set the prices 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 logical limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes scam websites from the genuine 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 site will likely have no contact info 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 dead silent to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your question.

As frauds tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a totally different site, 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 plenty of benign services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have the same feature 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, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some sites may also ask for payments in cryptocurrency, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency payments 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 on hand, they are not able to make unique images. Thus their only option is to steal these images elsewhere. When fraudsters offer the same goods on different websites, you can find such images on similarly-looking scam sites. 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 parasite on the same topic again and again, they reuse 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 advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such scams pretty easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the LiquidationRetailer.com Scam