Sportweary.com Review: Real Store or A Scam? Read This

Sportweary.com is a deceptive website that offers to buy women clothing at unusually discounted 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 this site is legitimate. After ordering from this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will demonstrate the red flags regarding the Sportweary.com store, the way this scam operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.

Sportweary.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Sportweary.com may initially appear like a genuine discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, excessively low prices, lack of user support and customer reviews – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.

Sportweary.com Scam

By purchasing on websites like Sportweary.com, it is improbable that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More frequently, 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 fraudulent items of popular brands, the quality 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 especially often case when ordering from sites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

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

Nothing at all. This is the most common outcome when ordering from sites like Sportweary.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a vague sight of legitimacy.

Sportweary.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Sportweary.com follows a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It usually consists of 3 stages, with some slight deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post massive amounts of promotions on online platforms, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 genuine, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 users are on the website, scammers do their best to make the individuals 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 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, 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 scammers, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once crooks get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback 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 cheats with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Sportweary.com 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, 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 websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, as there were only a few consumers 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 markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest 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 viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, scam sites 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 at a low price, but every sell-off has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes deceptive sites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam the clients, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the site will 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 reach them out, there is a huge chance that these emails and numbers will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers often reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they are mentioned on a different site, be sure you are facing a blatant scam.

A chain of scam sites 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 trustworthy services and shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have 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 ask for payments in cryptocurrency, which feature even less control. While cryptocurrency payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different fraudsters.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As rascals are unlikely to have any items, they cannot create unique pictures. Thus their option is to hijack these images elsewhere. When crooks sell the same goods on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-looking scam 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

This is the continuation of the stolen images I’ve just described. As rascals may use the same topic repeatedly, they put the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such frauds pretty easy, but scammers who run them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Sportweary.com Scam