Olivias-london.com Review: Real Store or A Scam? Read This

Olivias-london.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy women clothing at extremely low prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact 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 show the concerning indicators regarding the Olivias-london.com store, the way this scam operates, and show how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in upcoming times.

Olivias-london.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Olivias-london.com may initially appear like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, absence of customer support and customer testimonials – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.

Olivias-london.com Scam

By shopping on websites like Olivias-london.com, it is doubtful that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 scenarios standard for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to fake items of popular brands, the attribute 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 frequent 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, frauds may send a random item they have instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dented aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn rather inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most typical case when ordering from sites like Olivias-london.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting effort creating even a slight semblance of legitimacy.

Olivias-london.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Olivias-london.com runs 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 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not suspect 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 individuals are on the site, swindlers do their best to make the individuals buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, free shipping, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed consumers 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, 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints 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 fraudulent activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Olivias-london.com a Scam?

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

Hoax sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, since there were not many clients 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 unrealistic reviews that have no relation to 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. 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 feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, deceptive sites 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 at a low price, but every discount has its logical limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes fraudulent sites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the customers, 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 sites, the “About us” column is completely empty

When they offer an email, or even a phone to contact them, there is a huge chance that these contacts 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 numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a completely different site, 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 not a guarantee, as there are a lot of genuine services and shops 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 crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While crypto payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different fraudsters.

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 simply to hijack these images from other websites. When scams sell the same items on different pages, you can find such pics on similarly-looking fraudulent sites. By searching for the image 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

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

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Olivias-london.com Scam