Is Prestonandpayton.com Legit or a Scam? What You Need to Know

Prestonandpayton.com is a deceptive website that offers to purchase items 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 from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the red flags regarding the Prestonandpayton.com shop, the way this scam operates, and show how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in future.

Prestonandpayton.com Site – Scam Overview

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

Prestonandpayton.com Scam

By shopping on websites like Prestonandpayton.com, it is improbable that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More frequently, it results in one of 3 scenarios characteristic 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 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 specifically common case when ordering from pages that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the trade look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, frauds may send a accidental item they have instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – frauds may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most usual scenario when ordering items from websites like Prestonandpayton.com. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, frauds are not wasting effort creating even a faint sight of legitimacy.

Prestonandpayton.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Prestonandpayton.com follows 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 advertisements 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 legitimate, 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 mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once individuals are on the website, tricksters do their best to make the users buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, free delivery, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed individuals 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 rascals 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 fraudsters with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Prestonandpayton.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, scams 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 reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, since there were only a few 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, when you face unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam 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 trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, fraudulent websites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be ridiculous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold at a low price, but every sell-off has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes dishonest websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the clients, 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 likely 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 to contact them, there is a great possibility that these emails and numbers will be dead silent to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your question.

As scammers tend to reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used on a completely 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 genuine services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. Each of the latter has the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. 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 offer payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As fraudsters are unlikely to have any items, they are not able to shoot unique pics. Thus their option is to steal these images from other sites. When scammers offer identical items on different websites, you can find same pics on similarly-designed fraudulent 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

Scammers do not stop on stealing pictures. As frauds may scam people on the same topic repeatedly, they put the same site design under the new address, and voila – a new scam site is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It allows you to unveil such scams particularly 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 Prestonandpayton.com Scam