Ninetudishop.com Scam Alert: Beware of Counterfeit Products and More

Ninetudishop.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy women clothing at exceptionally cheap prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is actually just a story to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering goods from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will demonstrate the red flags regarding the Ninetudishop.com site, the way this scam operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.

Ninetudishop.com Site – Scam Overview

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

Ninetudishop.com Scam

By purchasing items on sites like Ninetudishop.com, it is unlikely that you will receive the goods you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 situations typical 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 quality 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 especially often case when ordering from sites that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look real, but spend even less money on the actual item, cheats may ship a accidental item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most typical case when ordering from sites like Ninetudishop.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a vague sight of legitimacy.

Ninetudishop.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Ninetudishop.com follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. 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 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not doubt 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 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 peculiar manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, tricksters 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user reports 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 fraudulent activity, the profits will dry up, leaving cheats with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Ninetudishop.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 untrustworthy without risking your money. Fortunately, scammers 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 online shopping sites will lack customer reviews shortly after the start, 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, 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 indistinct or gibberish 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% 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 outrageous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its reasonable limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes dishonest websites 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 – the page will 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 number to reach them out, there is a great possibility that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.

As scammers often reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a different site, be sure you are 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 whole lot of legit shops 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 attracts scammers – once you’ve sent the money, there’s no way 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 frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds are unlikely to have any real items, they are not able to create unique images. Thus their option is to steal these images from other websites. When rascals market the same items on different pages, you can find such images on similarly-looking scam pages. By reverse image searching 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

Rascals do not copy only pics. As rascals may scam people on the same topic again and again, they use the same web design under the new web-address, 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 site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams pretty easy, but crooks who create them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Ninetudishop.com Scam