How to spot a fake online shop before you pay
A scam shop can look exactly like a real one — same photos, same checkout, same trust badges. Here is how to tell the difference in under a minute, before your card is charged.
The €30 AirPods that never arrived
Tom saw an Instagram ad for AirPods at €30 — half the normal price, free shipping, and a sale ending in six hours. The shop looked great: clean design, glowing reviews, real product photos, and a familiar logo on the checkout. He paid, waited two weeks, then realised the order would never arrive.
When he tried to find the shop again, it had disappeared from the internet. The same scammers had already moved to a new domain selling the same fake deal. This pattern repeats thousands of times every day, and it is getting harder to spot by eye.
Five signs of a fake shop
The first sign is a price that is too good to be true — branded items at 70 or 80 percent off are almost never real. The second is a brand-new website you have never heard of, usually promoted only through ads on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Third, check the contact page — a real shop has a real address, a real phone number, and a company name; a scam has a contact form and a generic Gmail address at best.
Fourth, look at the reviews — if they all sound similar, were posted on the same day, or only exist on the shop's own site, treat them as decoration, not proof. Fifth, check the payment options — a real shop offers cards plus PayPal or Klarna, while a scam will push you to bank transfer or crypto, which cannot be reversed. Any one of these signs is a yellow flag, and two or more means walk away.
What to check before you click pay
Open a new tab and search the shop's name plus the word 'scam' or 'review' — real shops have years of mentions, scams have a few angry posts on forums. Look at when the website was registered, using a free tool called whois — a fashion brand selling 'limited stock' on a 14-day-old domain is a red flag. Read the address bar carefully, because many scams use a domain that is one letter off from a real shop, hoping you do not look closely.
Pay with a credit card if you can, because most cards let you reverse the charge if the goods never arrive. Avoid paying by bank transfer or crypto, because that money is almost impossible to get back once it has left your account. If anything still feels off, close the tab — a real bargain will be there tomorrow, but a scammer will not.
Why Sorinify catches these before you check out
Even careful shoppers miss the signs sometimes, especially on a phone or in a rush. Sorinify watches the shape of a scam, not just a list of known bad sites. When you land on a brand-new shop with copied photos, suspicious reviews, and a checkout that does not match the company name, you see a warning before you reach the card form.
We have trained on thousands of confirmed scam shops, so the pattern is recognised even when the domain is one nobody has reported yet. You do not need to play detective on every checkout page anymore. Sorinify does the checking quietly in the background, and only speaks up when something is off.