Ulikemarket.life is a scam website that offers to purchase various goods 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 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 show the warning signs regarding the Ulikemarket.life store, the way this fraud operates, and show how to detect similar frauds. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in upcoming times.
Ulikemarket.life Site – Scam Overview
As I said, Ulikemarket.life may initially seem like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a brief analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, lack of user support and customer feedback – this site completes the fraud bingo right away.
| Website | Ulikemarket.life |
| Hosting | AS209242 Cloudflare London, LLC Canada, Toronto |
| IP Address | 216.120.131.66 |
| Threat Type | Scam/Fraud |
| Scam Type | Fraudulent/Scam online shop |
Ulikemarket.life Scam
By shopping on pages like Ulikemarket.life, it is unlikely that you will obtain the items you’ve ordered. More typically, it results in one of 3 scenarios common 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 inform about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a especially common case when ordering from sites that offer baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.
Wrong item. To make the purchase look legit, but spend even less money on the actual item, rascals may ship a accidental item they have instead of what you’ve ordered. A worn t-shirt instead of a new one, a scratched aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.
Absolutely nothing. This is the most frequent scenario when ordering goods from pages like Ulikemarket.life. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then simply vanish. As scam websites do not aim to exist for a long time, scams are not wasting time creating even a slight visibility of legitimacy.
Ulikemarket.life scam – How does it work?
As any scam, Ulikemarket.life runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It usually consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.
Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post huge amounts of marketing on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly 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 consider ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become especially convincing 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 individuals are on the website, fraudsters do their best to make the consumers 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 users 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, scammers 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 tricksters get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough grievances and user reports about the site being a scam, they simply vanish. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough individuals know about the dishonest activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving crooks with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.
Why is Ulikemarket.life a Scam?
Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent without risking your money. Fortunately, scams 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 user reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack user feedback when they have just started, as there were not many clients yet. For that reason, this sign is not stand-alone and must be confirmed with 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 sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any blurred or nonsense 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. 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% reductions are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Black Friday. In some cases, deceptive sites have the initial price 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 logical limits.
3. No customer support.
This is what distinguishes fraudulent sites from the genuine ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the customers, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page (if it is present at all) – the page will likely have no contact info whatsoever.
Typically for fraudulent websites, 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 numbers and emails will be dead silent to your request. This, or you will receive some generic text regardless of your question.
As scoundrels often reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a different site, be sure you’re 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 legit 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 crypto, which feature even less control. While crypto transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different scammers.
5. Items’ images are sourced from another page
As rascals most likely don’t have any goods on hand, they are not able to create unique pictures. Thus their option is to steal these images elsewhere. When rascals market the same goods on different pages, you can find such images on similarly-designed fraudulent pages. By searching for the image 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 scammers may scam people on the same topic again and again, they use 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 I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such scams particularly easy, but criminals who run them never aim at cautious users.
Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design
