Sarahkatecharleston.com Scam Store: A Fake Sarah and Kate Charleston Website

Sarahkatecharleston.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy items from Sarah and Kate Charleston at unusually discounted prices. It may appear as a discounter, or as a marketplace for warehouse liquidation items, but it is actually just a narrative to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering goods from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

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

Sarahkatecharleston.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Sarahkatecharleston.com may initially look like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, lack of customer support and customer testimonials – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.

Sarahkatecharleston.com Scam

By shopping on sites like Sarahkatecharleston.com, it is questionable that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 scenarios typical 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 notify 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 websites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the delivered item, frauds may send a accidental item they have on hand instead of what you’ve ordered. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most typical scenario when ordering goods from pages like Sarahkatecharleston.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply disappear. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting effort creating even a vague visibility of legitimacy.

Sarahkatecharleston.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Sarahkatecharleston.com follows 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 massive amounts of marketing on online platforms, 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 users are on the site, tricksters do their best to make the individuals buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, free shipping, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed consumers 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, 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 tricksters get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user reports regarding the site being a scam, they simply vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people are aware about the dishonest activity, the profits will dry up, leaving scammers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Sarahkatecharleston.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, 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 feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack client testimonials when they have just started, since there were just a few clients 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 unclear or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam 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% discounts are not trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, dishonest websites set the prices 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 reasonable limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off 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 whatsoever.

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

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone number to reach them out, there is a huge chance that these contacts will be dead silent to your request. This, or they will answer you with 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 used on a 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 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 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 websites may also offer payments in cryptocurrency, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While crypto payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scams.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As frauds most likely don’t have any real items, they cannot make unique pictures. Thus their option is simply to steal these images from other websites. When scams market identical items on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-designed fraudulent sites. 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

Rascals do not stop on stealing pictures. As rascals may use the same topic again and again, they reuse the same site design under the new URL, 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 identical copy of the site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but scoundrels who create them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Sarahkatecharleston.com Scam