Worksoutlets.com Fact Check: Legitimate or Shady Scam?

Worksoutlets.com is a fraudulent website that offers to buy women clothing at extremely low prices. It may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a narrative to make you think this site is legitimate. 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 demonstrate the warning signs regarding the Worksoutlets.com shop, the way this fraud operates, and teach how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping scams in future.

Worksoutlets.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Worksoutlets.com may initially seem like a genuine discounter or the seller of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Questionable advertising methods, excessively low prices, absence of customer support and user reviews – this site fulfills the scam bingo right away.

Worksoutlets.com Scam

By purchasing on pages like Worksoutlets.com, it is uncertain that you will get the items you’ve ordered. More commonly, it results in one of 3 instances 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 specifically often case when ordering from pages that market 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 ship a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a new one, a scratched aluminum dish instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most typical situation when ordering from sites like Worksoutlets.com. Fraudsters take your money, promise the delivery, and then just vanish. As scam websites are not going to exist for a long time, scammers are not wasting effort creating even a vague visibility of legitimacy.

Worksoutlets.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Worksoutlets.com 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 massive amounts of marketing on online platforms, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say 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 deem ads on the mentioned platforms legitimate, they do not doubt anything at this point. Ads become particularly 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 customers are on the site, deceivers do their best to make the users buy something. Mind-boggling 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, tricksters 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 swindlers, “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 complaints 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 people know about the deceptive activity, the profits will dry up, leaving swindlers with no reason to move on. Reporting the scam to the hosting speeds up the domain takedown.

Why is Worksoutlets.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 untrustworthy 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

Fraud sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no reason (and way) to make any reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even legit online shopping sites will lack buyer opinions shortly after the start, since 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 nothing to do with what the site sells, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or absurdity reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest 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% discounts are not feasible even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, deceptive sites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be preposterous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold at a low price, but every discount has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive 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 site will have no contact info at all.

Typically for fraudulent websites, the “About us” column is completely empty

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone to reach them out, there is a great possibility 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 tend to reuse numbers and emails for specifying them as “support”, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a different website, 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 plenty of benign shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. All of them though have the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: these methods do not suppose any refund options. 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 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 frauds most likely don’t have any real items, they are not able to make unique pictures. Thus their only option is simply to hijack these images from other websites. When rascals offer identical items on different sites, you can find such pics on similarly-designed scam sites. By searching for the image 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

Rascals do not stop on stealing pics. As rascals may parasite on the same topic again and again, they put the same site design under the new address, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice I’ve mentioned above may lead you to the identical copy of the original site. It makes uncovering such scams pretty easy, but scammers who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Worksoutlets.com Scam