Big Lots Discount Scam

Are you still looking for Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day deals? Recently there have been lots of Facebook ads promoting Black Friday sales posted by scammers impersonating the legitimate company Big Lots. Don’t place any orders because these ads are confirmed scams. Keep on reading for more details on these Big Lots discount scams and some tips to spot such fake Facebook ads.

Big Lots Discount Scam

In our research, we found many different Facebook pages running ads promoting Black Friday sales in the name of the legitimate American discount retail store chain, Big Lots, highlighting discounts of up to 75% off:

Fake Big Lots Websites

If you were to take the bait and click, the ads would take you to one of several fake Big Lots websites. Below is an example of a fake Big Lots online shop and a list of bogus web addresses we’ve found:

Sample Big Lots discount scam site – Biglotsclearances[.]com

Sample URLs of fake Big Lots Discount Websites

• BigLotsDiscounts[.]com
• Biglots-sale[.]com
• Biglotsclearances[.]com
• Biglotsclearance[.]com
• Storevrey[.]com
• Mellifluoustar[.]com

Note: The web address of the genuine Big Lots website is biglots.com. Anything other than this is not legitimate. Take a closer look!

The Official Big Lots website – biglots.com

Red Flags of Big Lots Discount Scams

• Too-good-to-be-true deals.
• A copycat web address.
• A very recent site registration date. A quick Whois lookup can reveal the registration date of a site.
• Bad reputation. For example, Scamadviser gave biglotsdiscounts[.]com the lowest possible Trustscore rating:

• Page transparency: Several of the related Facebook pages were created very recently. However, some of them were created years ago, but their names were changed recently, indicating they were pages relating to something else before. See below for two examples.

Given all the information above, we recommend our readers avoid shopping or engaging with these “Big Lots discount” websites or any of the related Facebook pages. Stick to the official site (biglots.com) for safer shopping!

For more tips on how to check if a website is legitimate, please check out this article.

Protect Yourself from Scam Sites 

The truth is, there are lots of scams and scam sites on the internet and they’re getting even more difficult to detect with common sense alone. However, for an easy and reliable method of detecting and avoiding scam sites, check out Trend Micro ID Protection (for free!).         
 
ID Protection can shield you from scams, fake and malware-infected websites, dangerous emails, phishing links, and lots more! If you come across something risky online, you’ll be alerted in real time so you’ll know to stay well clear.     

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This article was published in collaboration with Trend Micro

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