Salefuet.best is a fraudulent website that offers to purchase various goods at exceptionally cheap prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is in fact just a story to make you think this site is legitimate. Upon ordering from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will demonstrate the concerning indicators regarding the Salefuet.best store, the way this deception operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.
Salefuet.best Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Salefuet.best may initially look like a legit discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer feedback – this site completes the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Salefuet.best |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.21.112.1 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Salefuet.best Scam
By shopping on websites like Salefuet.best, it is doubtful that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 instances common for scam sites.
Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to fake items of popular brands, the grade 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 specifically often case when ordering from websites that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the trade look legit, but spend even less money on the actual item, rascals may send a random item they have on hand instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.
Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent outcome when ordering from pages like Salefuet.best. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scam websites do not aim to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting time creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.
Salefuet.best scam – How does it work?
As any fraud, Salefuet.best runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Frauds post huge amounts of promotions on online platforms, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not doubt 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 disguise themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.
Step 2 – Take the Money. Once individuals are on the site, swindlers do their best to make the customers 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 users stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.
Payments are done in a unusual manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, tricksters 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 rascals get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user reports regarding the site being a scam, they just vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people know about the dishonest activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving scammers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Salefuet.best a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam 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 websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack consumer comments when they have just started, as there were not many patrons 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, once you face unrealistic reviews that have no relation to what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any vague or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on fraudulent 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% markdowns are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, deceptive sites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be preposterous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its sensible limits.
3. No customer support.
That factor distinguishes deceptive websites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the buyers, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the page 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 number to reach them out, there is a huge possibility that these contacts will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.
As scammers often reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they appear 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 a lot of benign services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. Each of the latter has 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, nothing will help you to get the money back.
Some sites may also ask for payments in cryptocurrency, which feature even less control. While crypto transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scammers.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As frauds are unlikely to have any items, they cannot shoot unique pics. Thus their option is simply to hijack these images from other websites. When scams offer the same items on different pages, you can find such pics on similarly-designed scam 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
This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As rascals may scam people on the same topic again and again, 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 I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such scams pretty easy, but criminals who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
