Vowneshirt.com Under Investigation – Scam or Legit? Read This

Vowneshirt.com is a scam website that offers to buy various clothing at extremely low 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. Upon 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 demonstrate the concerning indicators regarding the Vowneshirt.com store, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Vowneshirt.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Vowneshirt.com may initially seem like a authentic discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a concerning amount of red flags that indicate clearly about this site’s fraudulence. Questionable advertising methods, unreasonably low prices, lack of customer support and customer reviews – this site accomplishes the fraud bingo right away.

Vowneshirt.com Scam

By purchasing items on websites like Vowneshirt.com, it is improbable that you will acquire the goods you’ve ordered. More frequently, it results in one of 3 cases standard 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 characteristic 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 particularly often case when ordering from sites that offer 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, cheats may send a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a branded one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn really inventive in that case.

Nothing at all. This is the most common situation when ordering from pages like Vowneshirt.com. Scams take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scams do not aim to exist for a long time, rascals do not bother themselves with creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Vowneshirt.com scam – How does it work?

As any scam, Vowneshirt.com follows a simple and well-proven scheme of operations. It usually consists of 3 stages, with certain 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 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms benign, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly persuasive 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 users are on the website, deceivers do their best to make the users 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 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 fraudsters, “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 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 deceptive activity, the money flow will dry up, leaving scammers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Vowneshirt.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the hoax site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is fraudulent without risking your money. Fortunately, fraudsters 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 websites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with feedback. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack client testimonials shortly after the start, 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, when you face unrealistic reviews that have no relation to what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or balderdash reviews that may describe any item sold on the site 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% markdowns are not trustworthy even during sales events such as the aforementioned Thanksgiving day. In some cases, dishonest sites have the initial price 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 sensible limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to rip off the customers, there’s no need to waste time on answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the page will most 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 numbers and emails will be unresponsive to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers tend to reuse phone numbers and email addresses for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they are used 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 not a guarantee, as there are a lot of trustworthy shops and services using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or payment systems like them. All of them though have the same pitfall 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 ask for payments in cryptocurrency, which feature even less control. While cryptocurrency transactions expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scammers most likely don’t have any real items on hand, they cannot create unique pics. Thus their only option is simply to hijack these images elsewhere. When scammers market the same items on different websites, you can find such pics on similarly-looking 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 parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they use the same site design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the identical copy of the site you’ve started on. It makes uncovering such frauds particularly easy, but criminals who create them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Vowneshirt.com Scam