What to do if I have been scammed on the Internet.

Advice on what to do if I have been scammed on the Internet.

What to do if I have been scammed on the Internet.

 

Have you bought a product and it never came to you? Have you participated in any raffle and send spam to your email? Are you looking for a job and have lost a lot of money in calls to 900 numbers? These and other reasons are signs that you have been scammed.

We are going to give you some advice in the event that you have made a purchase in a fake online store and you never get the products you bought.

Types of scams

• Shopping in fake online stores.
• False job offers.
• False emails from Banks or other entities (Phishing).
• False emails from people you do not know offering, or even giving you something.
• Sentimental scams in contact pages.

Below we give you some tips to know what to do if you have scammed me.

 

 

ONLINE FALSE SHOPS

First, how do I know that I have been cheated?

To know if I have been scammed when making purchases in an internet store, follow these guidelines:

• I made a purchase in a fake online store and the products do not arrive or take me long.
• I call the phone that appears on the page and they do not answer me or give me long.
• I write to the email that appears on the page and they do not answer me.
• I fill out the contact or withdrawal form and I never get an answer, or the answers do not convince me.
• I have been charged a slightly higher amount than what supposedly cost the products I bought.

 

How to avoid being cheated if I want to buy something online?

1.- The first thing you have to do is to inform yourself well about the page you are viewing and about which you have doubts whether to buy or not.

2.- To be sure, search the full url of the store in Google.

Study the results you find and pay close attention to people’s forums and opinions. This is how you can make a first idea about the reliability of an online store.

3.- Search in our page the complete url of the store

We have a section where we list all the fake shops that we have found in alphabetical order.

If the store you are looking for is in our list, do not leave any doubt that it is a scam, it is a fake website. Many times the stores cancel their url or exchange it with others so that a url that was once a fake Nike store (for example), today can be toys. In fakeinet we are attentive and we list all the urls, or domains, that have ever hosted a fake store.

4.- Use Paypal as payment method.

Paypal is the safest way to pay because you even have insurance in case something goes wrong and sometimes they are responsible for claiming your money if there have been problems when receiving your products. All these fake shops do not use it, on the contrary, they all have a credit or debit card as a form of payment, because many times the scam is not charging you for a product you will never receive, but rather collecting all the information about your card and sell it on the Deepweb or make purchases with it fraudulently. Be very careful when paying by card in doubtful stores.

5.- Finally, remember this statement that is the most important: “If you have doubts about whether a store is fake DO NOT BUY!“.

It seems silly even obvious, right? Well, this is the best advice we can give you so you do not get scammed. Sometimes we get carried away by that incredible offer and by words like “Outlet” “Liquidation”. etc. And, true, many of them are true but, unfortunately, there are many others that are scams.

So if you have the slightest doubt about whether a store is fake, forget about buying, do not think that you lose an opportunity to buy that item “thrown away”, think that nobody gives anything and that your money is the most important thing. Every time there are more fake shops, that’s because users do not pay attention and still buy wanting to think it’s a real store, although on almost every occasion they (myself, yourself …) know that it’s about a fraud.

 

They have scammed me, what should I do?

 

In case you did not know our advice on how to know if an online store is false and you have been cheated, here are the steps you should follow:

1.- Collect all the information you can about the online store.

Save all the information that you have crossed with the store, emails, text messages or WhatsApp, etc., you can use it later to collect evidence and to send the product or even to report.

2.- Report what happened to the police.

If despite talking to those responsible for the web you see that your product does not arrive or you are at a point where you can not do more, it is best to report.

Although sometimes they can not do anything about it because the domains of the fake shops are housed in countries with laws that allow this type of scams, if it is okay to report it to put it in their knowledge and they are the ones who are responsible for pursuing this type of crimes. Who knows, maybe they’ll find the scammers and get your money back, but I’m sorry to tell you that, almost never happens.

3.- Warn your bank if there are strange movements in your credit card in the next few days, to avoid that you spend any purchase or even to block your card and do not make the payment.

The truth is that once you have made the payment with your card and you have been cheated, there is little to do since there are many legal gaps, especially in other countries. If you still want to claim your money in the page in which you have been scammed, you will realize that, in almost all:

• There is no data of the company (“seller” of the products) where to claim, neither CIF, nor address, nor telephone, nor email … (or any of them).
• There are no profiles of social networks of the company to get in touch there, sometimes they put the images of social networks but they do not direct to any profile or they direct to the main page of the social network.
• When you fill out the contact form of the fake store, you will never receive an answer or, failing that, they will give you “long”.

In the end, the saying that “prevention is better than cure” acquires its maximum value here.