Analyzing Onnitaliane.com: Should You Trust It? Our Take

Onnitaliane.com is a scam website that offers to purchase various goods 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 ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. Upon ordering goods from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the red flags regarding the Onnitaliane.com shop, the way this deception operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.

Onnitaliane.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Onnitaliane.com may initially appear like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, extremely low prices, lack of customer support and customer feedback – this site accomplishes the scam bingo right away.

Onnitaliane.com Scam

By purchasing on websites like Onnitaliane.com, it is unlikely that you will acquire the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 situations common for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to counterfeit items of popular brands, the standard 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 particularly often case when ordering from pages that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the deal look real, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may send a accidental item they have instead of what you’ve ordered. A worn t-shirt instead of a new one, a dirty aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most frequent case when ordering goods from websites like Onnitaliane.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a remote sight of legitimacy.

Onnitaliane.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Onnitaliane.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. Frauds post massive amounts of advertisements 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 consider 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 customers are on the website, tricksters do their best to make the individuals 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 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, 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 tricksters, “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 know about the deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving scammers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Onnitaliane.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 fraudulent without risking your money. Fortunately, frauds 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 reason (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack client testimonials when they have just started, as there were just a few buyers 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 sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or nonsense reviews that may describe any item sold on the website 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% reductions are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, fraudulent 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 rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes fraudulent websites from the legit ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam 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 site will have no contact info at all.

Typically for fraudulent sites, 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 emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your question.

As frauds often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a different website, 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 trustworthy shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has 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 crypto, which feature even less control. While crypto payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers most likely don’t have any real items, they cannot shoot unique pictures. Thus their option is to steal these images elsewhere. When crooks sell the same goods on different sites, you can find same pics on similarly-looking fraudulent sites. 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

This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As rascals may parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they put 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 on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the site you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such frauds particularly 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 Onnitaliane.com Scam