Is this website legit? Twelve checks that take five minutes

Why the obvious signals no longer work

The advice most people remember is to look for the padlock and check the spelling. Both were useful a decade ago and neither is much use now. Certificates are free and automated, so essentially every fraudulent shop has one, and the padlock means only that the connection is encrypted — not that the shop behind it will send you anything.

Fraudulent shops today are built from the same templates as legitimate ones, with copied product photography, invented reviews and plausible terms and conditions. Spelling is often flawless. What still gives them away is not appearance but the paper trail: who registered the domain, when, what company details are given, and how they want to be paid.

You are not looking for a badly made website. You are looking for a business that cannot be identified.

Check the domain first — it is the hardest thing to fake

A fraudulent shop needs a domain, and domains carry records. This is where most fakes fail before you look at anything else.

• **Domain age.** Use a WHOIS lookup to see when the domain was registered. A shop offering hundreds of products on a domain registered three weeks ago is the single strongest warning sign there is.
• **Registration length.** Fraudulent domains are typically registered for one year, the minimum. Established businesses register for longer.
• **Registrant details.** Privacy protection is normal and not itself suspicious. But a shop claiming to be an established European company while hiding behind privacy protection on a domain registered last month is a different matter.
• **The domain name itself.** Look for near-misses of well-known brands: an added hyphen, a swapped letter, a different top-level domain. These are designed to be misread at a glance.

Domain age alone is not proof of anything — legitimate new businesses exist. But combined with anything else on this list, a domain registered weeks ago should stop you.

Company details: what EU law actually requires

Any business selling to consumers in the EU must identify itself. Under the e-Commerce Directive and consumer protection rules, a trader has to provide its name, geographic address, contact details and, where registered, its trade register entry and VAT number. This is not optional and not a formality.

• Look for a company name, a registration number and a physical address — not just a contact form
• Check the registration number in the relevant national business register; most are free and searchable online
• Verify the VAT number through the European Commission's VIES service, which confirms whether a number is valid and to whom it belongs
• Search the address itself. Fake shops frequently use residential addresses, virtual offices, or an address belonging to an entirely different company

The absence of identification is decisive on its own. A shop that will not say who it is has told you what you need to know, and no amount of professional design changes that.

A legitimate EU trader is legally required to be identifiable. One that is not identifiable is either breaking the law or not a trader.

How they want to be paid tells you what they expect

This is the most reliable signal on the entire list, because it reflects the seller's own assessment of what will happen next.

• **Bank transfer only, or a discount for paying by transfer.** Transfers are near-impossible to reverse. A seller steering you away from card payment is steering you away from your own protection.
• **Cryptocurrency, gift cards or vouchers.** No legitimate retail business needs these, and they are irreversible by design.
• **Payment to a personal account** rather than a company account, particularly one in a different name from the shop.
• **A payment page on a different domain** than the shop, or one that looks visually different from the rest of the site.

Pay by card where you have the choice. The dispute mechanism is worth more than any discount offered for paying another way, and the seller who refuses cards is telling you they do not expect the transaction to survive scrutiny.

Prices that cannot be true

Fraudulent shops compete on price because they have no costs. A discount of seventy or eighty percent on current, in-demand products is not a clearance sale.

• Compare against two or three other retailers — not against the crossed-out 'original price' shown on the same site, which is invented
• Be particularly cautious with products that are hard to obtain elsewhere; scarcity is exactly what the fake shop is exploiting
• Watch for countdown timers and stock counters that reset when you reload the page

The psychology here is deliberate. Urgency and a price too good to refuse are designed to move you past exactly the checks described in this article.

Reverse image search: the check almost nobody does

Fraudulent shops rarely photograph anything. Product images, and often the 'about us' team photographs, are taken from elsewhere.

• Right-click a product image and search for it by image in Google or another reverse image service
• If the same photograph appears on dozens of unrelated shops, it is a stock or copied image — common for legitimate resellers too, so weigh it accordingly
• If it appears on the manufacturer's site and nowhere else, the shop has copied it directly
• Team and office photographs are the strongest tell: if the 'founder' appears in a stock photo library, the business is fictitious

This takes thirty seconds and catches fakes that survive every other check.

Reviews, and why on-site reviews prove nothing

Reviews displayed on the shop's own website are written by whoever controls the website. They tell you nothing at all. What matters is what exists independently of the seller.

• Search for the shop name together with words like 'scam', 'review' or 'not delivered' — including on forums and social media
• Check independent review platforms, and look at the pattern rather than the average: a burst of five-star reviews in a single week, all short and generic, is manufactured
• Look at negative reviews specifically, and at how the seller responded
• Check whether the shop appears on national consumer protection warning lists; many EU authorities publish them

Absence of any independent trace is itself informative. A shop that supposedly serves thousands of customers but leaves no footprint anywhere outside its own domain is not what it claims to be.

Terms, delivery and returns

Fake shops copy terms from real ones and rarely check what they pasted. This produces inconsistencies that are easy to spot if you read.

• Terms referring to a different company name, a different country, or a currency the shop does not use
• No returns policy, or one that contradicts EU rules — consumers have a right of withdrawal for most distance purchases
• Delivery times that are vague, or unusually long in a way that conveniently outlasts the window for a payment dispute
• Contact details that lead nowhere: an unanswered phone number, a bounced email, a form with no reply

Send an email before you buy and see whether anyone replies, and how. It costs nothing and a non-response is an answer.

The five-minute version

If you only have a few minutes, these four catch most of it:

• WHOIS lookup — how old is the domain?
• Company identification — is there a registration number, and does it check out?
• Payment methods — can you pay by card, or are they pushing you elsewhere?
• Search the shop name with 'scam' — what comes back?

A shop failing any two of these is not worth the risk, whatever the price.

If you have already paid

Then the priority changes completely, and the first step is not to contact the seller.

• **Capture the listing, the terms and the payment page now.** Fraudulent shops edit or disappear within hours, and your bank will ask what the offer said at the time you paid — the one document most people cannot produce.
• **Contact your payment provider the same day.** Card payments have a dispute mechanism with deadlines; transfers can sometimes be recalled if you act within hours.
• **File a police report**, and notify your national consumer protection authority.
• **Do not contact the seller first.** A seller who realises you are onto them removes the evidence before replying.

The order matters more than the speed. Ten minutes spent documenting before you do anything else is what makes every subsequent step possible.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Consumer rights, reporting routes and available remedies differ between EU member states. For a specific case, consult your national consumer protection authority or a qualified lawyer.

Frequently asked questions