EN
Official Domain
glitters.store
Registered on
2020-01-08
Location
Guangdong, China
Owner
Not provided
Alexa Rank
412,292 (Low)
Website Speed
Slow
Other Websites on Server
262,657 other websites on this server
Glitters.Store is an online store which sells just a single product – a handmade cat bed. The website is as plain as it gets. There’s a simple home page which contains a banner with no text, one product listing and a footer section with links to other pages. The website has a low Alexa Rank which shows that it is not very popular and the slow speed indicates a sub-optimal user experience. The website is also hosted on a shared server with more than 262,000 other websites which indicates that it is a low-cost operation.
The cat bed which Glitters.Store is selling is available on other websites, including Amazon. However, there is a price difference of roughly $250-$300 between Glitters.Store and other sellers. This kind of pricing is highly suspect and makes the website likely to be a scam. The low price being offered by Glitters.Store is supposedly marked down from the original price of $49.99. I could not find this kind of product for less than $250 anywhere; therefore, it seems that Glitter is offering a too-good-to-be-true deal to lure unsuspecting buyers. The images on Glitters’ website are also low-quality which signals that that they were simply copied from the original sources.
The most surprising part of the investigation came when I went to check whether the content of the website is original. As expected, it turned out that the same content can be found on several other websites. What astonished me though, is that there are at least 242 websites using the same content.
When I pasted a small snippet of the text from the About Us page of Glitters.Store into Google, it returned hundreds of search results. All these websites are suspiciously low-quality ecommerce stores similar to Glitters.Store. They may be part of a network running the same scam through different websites, Facebook pages, Amazon stores and even apps on the Google Play Store.
The full list of websites using the same text as Glitters.Store is given below (Warning: long scroll). Many of these websites are now inactive, as is the case with most scam ecommerce stores. These websites all carry the text ‘we love every passion and interest on Earth because it is a reference to your UNIQUENESS’. Therefore, the list has been termed as the ‘Uniqueness’ network. The full list is given at the end of this article (Appendix 1).
Glitters.Store only accepts PayPal and the company name is shown as ‘Xingyao e-commerce Co., Limited’ while making a payment. A lookup of this company name revealed a complaint filed against the company with PayPal on 1st June 2020. There are 93 votes from other users saying they had the same experience. This particular dispute was solved after a refund from PayPal. The exact website is not mentioned but it seems these buyers in this thread were able to contact the seller.
Email ID
service@24hforu.online
Phone Number
Not provided
Address
Not provided
Company Name
Not provided
Registration Number
Not provided
Owner
Not provided
Social Media Profiles
Not found
Scamadviser Verification
The Scamadviser page of Glitters.Store has not been claimed by the company.
Glitters.Store has no social media presence. Though there are social media buttons on the website, they lead to the home pages of the websites and not to the company’s profiles. The only way to contact Glitters.Store is on email address service@24hforu.online. This email was shown as being unable to receive emails when checked using MailTester, which could mean that it is a fake email address.
Furthering the suspicion that Glitters.store is part of a larger network is the fact that the email ID was also found on a total of 54 websites, including Glitters.Store. The complete list of websites using the email ID service@24hforu.online is given at the end of the article (Appendix 2)
Glitters.Store has a user score of 1/5 based on 1 review. Additionally, there are multiple comments which have been left using the Facebook plugin. These reviews allege the same kind of scam mentioned in the PayPal dispute earlier, wherein they received some other product of a much lower value. These users have mentioned products such as ‘Nuclear Explosion Lamps’ and ‘Mushroom Cloud Lamps’ which are no longer available on the website. One of the reviews mentions Aiquten.com which does have those lamps. This could mean that Glitters.Store and Aiquten.com were identical at some point. This could not be confirmed using the Wayback Machine as there is only one snapshot of Glitters.Store and it is quite recent.
Aiquten carries the same ‘Uniqueness’ snippet of text but has not been indexed by Google yet. Therefore, it is clear that there are many more of these websites which cannot be found easily.
Aiquiten does not have a ‘nofollow’ instruction in the robots.txt, which means it should appear on Google. The reason Aiqueten has not been picked up by Google yet could be its low quality and lack of traffic.
You can read the user reviews here.
After compiling the list of websites (Appendix 1 and Appendix 2), were extracted some data to determine whether any connection between the websites could be found. Data obtained for 184 websites from the list revealed that most of these online stores do indeed have a common origin.
As per the findings, there are just 3 IP addresses which are associated with 63% of the websites. The rest of the websites are scattered across different IP addresses, but most of the sites share a network or host.
Almost 70% of the websites for which the registration data is available are registered in China and its administrative regions viz. Hong Kong and Macao.
There is an extremely high likelihood of Glitters.Store and the 290+ websites in the ‘Uniqueness’/service@24hforu.online network being a scam. Our analysis has shown that most of these websites share IP addresses and are therefore clearly related.
Scamadviser’s algorithms have given Glitters.Store and the others in the ‘Uniqueness’ network a low Trust Score of 1%, indicating that it is extremely risky to shop on these websites. You can read more about Glitters.Store’s Trust Score here.
The websites have several red flags, such as low-quality layouts, copied content including text and images, suspiciously low prices and lack of contact details. The email ID is likely to be fake and is used by more than 50 other websites, which could all be part of the same scam. There are several complaints which echo the same scam of wrong products being delivered. It is not advisable to shop on these online stores, as they are highly likely to be scams.
There is a simple test you can do yourself before shopping on such unknown websites. Visit the About Us page and copy a small snippet of text which doesn’t contain the website name. Go to Google and paste the text within double quotes (“ ”). This search will show you whether the text used is original or not. You can do the same for the email address too.
As we can see in this article, there are countless e-commerce stores which are scamming customers by sending them the wrong products. It is important to exercise caution when shopping online to avoid losing your money or ending up unhappy with your purchase. To know more about how you can have a pleasant online shopping experience while ordering from Chinese ecommerce stores, read the article 7 Common Mistakes to Avoid with Chinese Stores.
Shopping on such websites can also compromise your card or bank details, which could then be used to carry out unauthorized transactions: How to Recognize a Scam – Phishing.
Follow our social media channels for news about the latest scams and tips to stay safe online. We also invite you to join the growing community of scam fighters on our Facebook Group.
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Here’s the full list of online stores which are suspected to be a part of the ‘Uniqueness’ network:
The below list contains all the websites which were found to be using the email address service@24hforu.online which has also been provided by Glitters.Store:
This article has been written by a scam fighter volunteer. If you believe the article above contains inaccuracies or is missing relevant information, please contact Scamadviser.com using this form.
