Investigating Turmericpad.com: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Turmericpad.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy items at unusually discounted prices. It may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is in fact just a narrative to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After placing an order on this site, you will likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will demonstrate the concerning indicators regarding the Turmericpad.com site, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping deceptions in upcoming times.

Turmericpad.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Turmericpad.com may initially seem 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 customer support and user testimonials – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.

Turmericpad.com Scam

By shopping on websites like Turmericpad.com, it is improbable that you will acquire the goods you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 situations standard for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to imitation items of popular brands, the quality 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 specifically frequent case when ordering from sites 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, rascals may send a incidental item they have on hand instead of your order. A worn t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent outcome when ordering from sites like Turmericpad.com. Fraudsters 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 slight sight of legitimacy.

Turmericpad.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Turmericpad.com 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 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 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 consumers are on the website, swindlers do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling deals, additional discount promo codes, free delivery, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed individuals 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, deceivers 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 swindlers get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user feedback 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 are aware about the fraudulent activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving swindlers with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Turmericpad.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the fraud site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent 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

Hoax sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any reputation with reviews. Obviously, even benign shopping sites will lack customer reviews when they have just started, as there were only a few buyers 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 no relation to what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on deceptive 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% markdowns are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, dishonest websites set the prices low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be outrageous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its sane limits.

3. No customer support.

That factor distinguishes fraudulent sites from the legit ones, even newly established. When a site is about to scam the buyers, 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 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 dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.

As scammers often reuse phone numbers and email addresses 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 complementary, as there are a whole lot of benign services 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 is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different frauds.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers most likely don’t have any items, they cannot make unique pics. Thus their only option is to hijack these images from other sites. When scams sell the same goods on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-designed fraudulent 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

Frauds do not stop on stealing pics. As frauds may parasite on 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 from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the page you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such scams pretty easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Turmericpad.com Scam