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A horde of websites is likely cashing on gullible shoppers through a holding company in China. We are talking about ChicV International Holding Ltd, which owns over 230 domains that only sell women’s clothing. The company website says “CHICV CREATING A LEADING ONLINE LIFESTYLE IN THE WORLD”.
A quick look at the company home page told us the company is located in Guangzhou, China with branches across the country. The company name here is written as ChicV Technology, which is different than the registrant name on Whois. ChicV says it runs brand sites such as StyleWe, Justfashionnow and Noracora.
Fellow scam buster James Greening has written about StyleWe earlier (check here), and concluded that it is likely a fraud website.
A Google search of ChicV brings up community pages of PayPal users, most with complaints about the company. This what a user posted on the forum back in 2018.
Meanwhile, another user had this to say about ChicV two years later in 2020:
It is well known that the company is very likely to be a fraud. However, the problem is the vast network of websites that operate under ChicV that are also very likely to be frauds.
Let us talk about the 230+ websites that we know link to ChicV. All the links are registered under the same company name, and several have identical IP addresses.
We checked on Website Informer for the top visited links related to ChicV and found www.domrank.com. The first thing we saw was an outdated sale advert from Black Friday which generally falls in November (see below). We also noticed that almost all websites in the ChicV Scam Network have flashy and stylish clothes, most likely a trick to lure people.
At the bottom of the website it says “Domrank is a platform from the online fashion shop with independent fashion designers.” We chose a random product from the page and ran a Google Image search of the picture of the shirt. We found several 15+ more sites with the same product. There is no mention of the brand name or recognition to the designer, so it is hard to believe when Domrank claims it sells items from independent fashion designers. We checked two websites from the list (see below), but they showed no links to ChicV, however, we are not sure of how authentic they themselves are. But this is enough proof that Domrank is not true to its word.
ChicV has been around since 2014, as shown by a Whois lookup. The company has been gallivanting online as a fashion brand group while complaints about its websites pile up. We analyzed the 230+ websites we found using our Scamadviser Analyzer.
As per the available data, most websites from the network were registered less than a year ago by ChicV, so it is likely that the company could be running a scam using disposable websites. Some of the oldest sites were from 2014.
Across the board, the average review score of the websites was below 3 out of 5. Only 11 websites managed to score a rating over 3. Over half the websites had a rating of zero, indicating few to no reviews on sites such as Trustpilot, Sitejabber and MyWOT.
Meanwhile, some websites score well in Alexa ranking, with four under 100,000. A ranking less than 500,000 is considered good. Interestingly, three these websites were registered just last month. This indicates that the websites may be receiving a large push to drive traffic through online ads, such as on Facebook and Instagram.
The average review score for ChicV’s sites is merely 0.7 out of 5, while the average Trust Score is 51.6 out of 100. For a so-called fashion conglomerate, these ratings are very poor.
There are innumerable posts online regarding people being cheated by ChicV. We have written about two other websites from the network in the past — PearlClo and Hipbel, and concluded that the websites were suspicious. The company name keeps popping up on our complaints feed every once in a while.
We also came across multiple company names for ChicV. Any registered company may have two names, one Chinese and one English after translation. But in the case of ChicV, there are several names such as ChicV UK, ChicV International Holding, ChicV Ltd Corp, ChicV Technology and Beijing Xike Technology. Legitimate companies rarely have multiple name for the simple reason that it would hurt the brand value of the company.
However, the multiple names could be an attempt to hide the real identity of the people behind ChicV. In China, there are often multiple companies with similar names that have minor differences. ChicV is likely taking advantage of this loophole in China’s business environment and posing as a legitimate enterprise.
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.
