Livy-newyork.com Scam Store: A Fake Online Shop

Livy-newyork.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact just a narrative to make you think this site is legitimate. After ordering goods from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will highlight the concerning indicators regarding the Livy-newyork.com site, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Livy-newyork.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Livy-newyork.com may initially look like a legit discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of customer support and user feedback – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.

Livy-newyork.com Scam

By shopping on pages like Livy-newyork.com, it is unlikely that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 instances common 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 grade 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 particularly often case when ordering from sites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the purchase look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the delivered item, scammers may send a incidental item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dented aluminum plate instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most typical case when ordering from websites like Livy-newyork.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scam websites do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Livy-newyork.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Livy-newyork.com runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It usually consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post abundant amounts of promotions 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms genuine, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 users are on the website, deceivers do their best to make the customers buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, 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 quirky 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 rascals get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user reports about 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 deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Livy-newyork.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 deceptive 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 purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with feedback. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack customer reviews shortly after the start, as there were just a few clients 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 no relation to what the site markets, 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 dishonest 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% discounts 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 at a low price, but every sell-off has its logical limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive websites from the benign 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 page will most likely have no support contacts at all.

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

When they offer an email, or even a phone to reach them out, there is a great chance that these contacts will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a totally different site, 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 complementary, as there are a lot of legit services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. 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 attracts scammers – once you’ve sent the money, 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 frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they cannot shoot unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to hijack these images elsewhere. When frauds sell identical goods on different pages, you can find such images on similarly-looking fraudulent 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

Frauds do not copy only photos. As frauds may use the same topic again and again, they put the same site design under the new web-address, 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 pretty easy, but criminals who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Livy-newyork.com Scam