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

Openbazaarl.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted prices. It may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After placing an order on this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the red flags regarding the Openbazaarl.com store, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Openbazaarl.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Openbazaarl.com may initially appear like a legit discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and user reviews – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.

Openbazaarl.com Scam

By purchasing on sites like Openbazaarl.com, it is questionable that you will receive the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 instances characteristic for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to imitation items of popular brands, the standard will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may inform about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a specifically frequent case when ordering from pages that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the deal look real, but spend even less money on the actual item, scammers may ship a random item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a dented aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most usual outcome when ordering items from pages like Openbazaarl.com. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a vague visibility of legitimacy.

Openbazaarl.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Openbazaarl.com follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It usually consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post huge amounts of marketing on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benign, 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 mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once individuals are on the website, scammers 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 curious 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 swindlers, “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 fraudulent, they simply vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough customers know about the fraudulent activity, the profits 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 Openbazaarl.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 untrustworthy 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 websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, since there were only a few 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 indistinct or balderdash 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% 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 outrageous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every sell-off has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive sites 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 (if it is present at all) – the page will likely have no support contacts whatsoever.

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

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

As frauds often reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a different website, be sure that this is 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 genuine shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have the same pitfall I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what makes it so attractive to scammers – once you’ve sent the money, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some websites may also offer payments in cryptocurrency, which feature even less control. While crypto transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different fraudsters.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they are not able to shoot unique pics. Thus their option is to steal these images elsewhere. When crooks sell identical items on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking fraudulent pages. 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 steal only pics. As scammers may use 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, reverse image search on Google advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such scams 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 Openbazaarl.com Scam