Online business is booming and scammers are having a heyday in the Covid pandemic. We have already written about the bank direct payments scandal that sees people buying from social media and never getting the goods and services they paid for. Another scandal is fake websites. It is becoming increasingly common for fake websites to set up, sell a massive range of products, often make their website look vaguely professional, and then buy a bundle of advertising on major platforms (Google, Facebook, etc). People click the link to the product, go to the fake website, order and pay, then the item never materialises.
Our attention was drawn to this scamming phenomenon when a customer wrote to us asking if we would price match with another website recently – we were puzzled as the price was incredibly low – and we then found this website was using our photographs (one taken in my living room!) and our company name. We are not a wholesaler and had not sold clothing to them. Being a small company, we knew the customers who had bought the dress that was wanted – so we were pretty convinced this was a fake website.
We used a scam detector (scam-detector.com) to find out more about the website and found it had a rating of just 2.7/100.
Don’t get scammed please. There is so much work, skill and craftsmanship that goes into making artisan clothing. Real people make our clothes, who have families to support. They work in cottage industries and workshops – and we are doing our best to offer you the very best prices we can. If you live in York or Epping then we can probably deliver your order personally. It would be lovely to meet you!
