Prelltronics.com Scam Store: A Fake Online Shop

Prelltronics.com is a scam 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 ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. 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 show the red flags regarding the Prelltronics.com shop, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Prelltronics.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Prelltronics.com may initially appear like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a troubling amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and user feedback – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.

Prelltronics.com Scam

By shopping on pages like Prelltronics.com, it is questionable that you will get the goods you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 instances typical 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 characteristic will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may indicate about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a notably frequent case when ordering from sites that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the deal look real, but spend even less money on the delivered item, rascals may send a incidental item they have instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a new one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most common scenario when ordering from pages like Prelltronics.com. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Prelltronics.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Prelltronics.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. Frauds post abundant amounts of promotions on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms genuine, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially compelling 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 users buy something. Impossibly good 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 fraudsters, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once scoundrels get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback about the site being a scam, they just vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals know about the dishonest 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 Prelltronics.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 deceptive 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

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 online shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, since there were not many patrons 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, once 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 gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam sites 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% markdowns are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, deceptive 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 sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes scam websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the buyers, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the site 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 number to contact them, there is a great chance that these numbers and emails will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scoundrels tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a completely different website, 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 complementary, as there are a whole lot of legit services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what attracts scammers – once you paid for the order, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some websites 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 scammers.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams are unlikely to have any goods, they cannot make unique images. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When crooks sell the same items on different pages, you can find such images on similarly-designed scam pages. 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

Frauds do not stop on stealing pictures. As scammers may use the same topic repeatedly, they put the same site design under the new address, and voila – a new scam 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 pretty easy, but scoundrels who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Prelltronics.com Scam