Turquoisedoorboutique.us is a fraudulent website that offers to purchase items at unusually discounted prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, poor-quality or counterfeit items.
In this article, I will highlight the warning signs regarding the Turquoisedoorboutique.us shop, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.
Turquoisedoorboutique.us Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Turquoisedoorboutique.us may initially look like a legit discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a quick analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, lack of customer support and customer reviews – this site fulfills the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Turquoisedoorboutique.us |
| Hosting | AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. United States, San Francisco |
| IP Address | 104.18.73.116 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Turquoisedoorboutique.us Scam
By purchasing items on sites like Turquoisedoorboutique.us, it is doubtful that you will acquire the items you’ve ordered. More often, it results in one of 3 situations characteristic 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 attribute 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 common case when ordering from websites that promote baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the purchase look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, cheats may ship a accidental item they have on hand instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a dirty aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn rather inventive in that case.
Nothing at all. This is the most usual case when ordering from sites like Turquoisedoorboutique.us. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scams are not going to exist for a long time, fraudsters do not bother themselves with creating even a faint semblance of legitimacy.
Turquoisedoorboutique.us scam – How does it work?
As any fraud, Turquoisedoorboutique.us follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post massive amounts of advertisements on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 especially persuasive 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 consumers are on the site, tricksters do their best to make the consumers buy something. Impossibly good 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 consumers 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, 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 deceivers, “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 grievances and user feedback about the site being fraudulent, they simply vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals know about the deceptive activity, the profits will dry up, leaving crooks with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.
Why is Turquoisedoorboutique.us a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is deceptive without risking your money. Fortunately, frauds 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 online reputation with reviews. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack user feedback when they have just started, since there were not many 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 unrealistic reviews that have nothing to do with what the site offers for sale, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any obscure or drivel 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% discounts are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, deceptive sites 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 reasonable limits.
3. No customer support.
That factor distinguishes scam websites from the legit 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 most likely have no contact info at all.
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 possibility that these numbers and emails 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 totally 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 benign services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. Each of the latter has 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, there’s no way to get the money back.
Some sites 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 rascals most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they are not able to shoot unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to hijack these images elsewhere. When frauds offer identical goods on different sites, you can find such images on similarly-designed fraudulent 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
Frauds do not copy only pics. As rascals may use the same topic again and again, they reuse the same web design under the new URL, 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 identical copy of the page you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such frauds pretty easy, but scoundrels who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
