Topsales.bio is a fraudulent website that offers to buy various goods at exceptionally cheap prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a story 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, poor-quality or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will show the red flags regarding the Topsales.bio store, the way this fraud operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.
Topsales.bio Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Topsales.bio may initially seem like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a short analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s deception. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and customer feedback – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Topsales.bio |
| Hosting | AS45903 CMC Telecom Infrastructure Company Vietnam, Hanoi |
| IP Address | 42.96.58.20 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Topsales.bio Scam
By shopping on pages like Topsales.bio, it is unlikely that you will acquire the goods 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 counterfeit items of popular brands, the characteristic will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may mention 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 websites that market baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the purchase look more legitimate, but spend even less money on the actual item, cheats may ship a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a dented aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most common situation when ordering goods from pages like Topsales.bio. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely vanish. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.
Topsales.bio scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Topsales.bio 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 massive amounts of advertisements 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 regard ads on the mentioned platforms benign, 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 mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.
Step 2 – Take the Money. Once customers are on the website, tricksters do their best to make the consumers buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discount promo codes, free shipping, 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 quirky 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 deceivers, “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 feedback regarding the site being fraudulent, 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 fraudsters with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.
Why is Topsales.bio 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, rascals 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
Hoax sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any reputation with feedback. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack consumer comments shortly after the start, since there were not many 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 phishy-looking reviews that have nothing to do with what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any unclear or gibberish reviews that may describe any item sold on the website should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on scam websites you will get an entire saltcellar. Do not hesitate searching 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 feasible 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 ludicrous, 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.
This is what distinguishes dishonest sites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the customers, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the page will likely have no support contacts at all.
Typically for fraudulent sites, the “About us” column is completely empty
When they offer an email, or even a phone 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 question.
As frauds often reuse phone numbers and email addresses as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they appear 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 not a guarantee, as there are a whole lot of trustworthy 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: these methods do not suppose any refund options. And this is what attracts 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 feature even less control. While crypto transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scams.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As scams most likely don’t have any items on hand, they cannot shoot unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to steal these images elsewhere. When rascals market identical goods on different pages, you can find same images on similarly-designed scam 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 pics. As frauds may use 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, image search on Google advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams pretty easy, but crooks who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
