Probablyious.com Scam Store: What You Need To Know

Probablyious.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy clothing at unusually discounted prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is in fact just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. Upon 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 warning signs regarding the Probablyious.com site, the way this deception operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.

Probablyious.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Probablyious.com may initially seem like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Unfair advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, lack of user support and customer reviews – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.

Probablyious.com Scam

By purchasing on sites like Probablyious.com, it is uncertain that you will receive the goods you’ve ordered. More often, 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 fraudulent items of popular brands, the quality 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 especially often case when ordering from pages that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the purchase look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, scammers may send a incidental item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. A worn t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dented aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most usual situation when ordering from pages like Probablyious.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just disappear. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, fraudsters are not wasting time creating even a slight sight of legitimacy.

Probablyious.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Probablyious.com runs 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. Frauds post massive amounts of marketing 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not suspect 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 users are on the website, tricksters do their best to make the consumers buy something. Mind-boggling 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 customers stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.

Payments are done in a peculiar 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 scoundrels get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback 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 dishonest activity, the profits will dry up, leaving scammers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Probablyious.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

Fraud sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with feedback. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack buyer opinions when they have just started, as 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 phishy-looking reviews that have no relation to what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or balderdash reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on deceptive sites 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 viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, dishonest websites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be absurd, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every sell-off has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes scam websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the buyers, 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 contact info at all.

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

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone to contact them, there is a huge possibility that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As frauds tend to reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a totally 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 a lot of genuine 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, there’s no way to get the money back.

Some sites may also ask for payments in cryptocurrency, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scams.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds are unlikely to have any items, they are not able to create unique images. Thus their only option is to steal these images from other sites. When crooks sell identical goods on different sites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking scam 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

Rascals do not stop on stealing pics. As frauds may use the same topic repeatedly, they use the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the original site. It allows you to unveil such frauds particularly easy, but criminals who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Probablyious.com Scam