 Poster: A snowHead
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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assuming it is in the Shopping centre , then why is not here?
https://www.stratfordshopping.co.uk/stores/
except that there is no disclaimer , legal notice or how is it in English
In GeR is Impressum.
They advice that on line shops without that are always scam
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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| turms2 wrote: |
assuming it is in the Shopping centre , then why is not here?
https://www.stratfordshopping.co.uk/stores/
except that there is no disclaimer , legal notice or how is it in English
In GeR is Impressum.
They advice that on line shops without that are always scam |
That's true, didn't think to check the stores directory, saved me a trip. 
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Site reeks of fraud, and Scamadviser gives it a score of 7/100
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Tip - read the T&Cs
LLC plastered everywhere.
No such thing in the UK - its Ltd.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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| Gored wrote: |
Tip - read the T&Cs
LLC plastered everywhere.
No such thing in the UK - its Ltd. |
You can operate an LLC in the UK as an offshore company. The T&C uses American spelling and says you can call them on CST (central standard time), which is American
I wouldn't touch it
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Yes it is a scam site.
And I haven't even had to look at it to know that.
How to spot a scam site:
1. someone on mumsnet, pistonhead, snowheads, bikeradar posts a post saying "prices too good to be true"
2. it looks like a cookie cutter site that gets spun up in a few minutes
3. it has a long domain name
4. the domain is new
5. the physical address is fake
6. the contact phone is fake
I'm sure someone can post many more red flags
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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@luanb, why would you think it was NOT dodgy?
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| under a new name wrote: |
| @luanb, why would you think it was NOT dodgy? |
Hope and optimism? 
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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@luanb, if it looks too good to be true ...
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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| under a new name wrote: |
| @luanb, if it looks too good to be true ... |
Indeed, which was why I asked..lol.
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Question is, why does it come up high on google search? Did the scammers figured out how to game google’s search engine?
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You know it makes sense.
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@abc,
No, it's because 1000's of snowheads are curious 
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Poster: A snowHead
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| abc wrote: |
| Question is, why does it come up high on google search? Did the scammers figured out how to game google’s search engine? |
what makes you think it does?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| davidof wrote: |
Yes it is a scam site.
And I haven't even had to look at it to know that.
How to spot a scam site:
1. someone on mumsnet, pistonhead, snowheads, bikeradar posts a post saying "prices too good to be true"
2. it looks like a cookie cutter site that gets spun up in a few minutes
3. it has a long domain name
4. the domain is new
5. the physical address is fake
6. the contact phone is fake
I'm sure someone can post many more red flags |
And you can tell all that without even looking ? I’m impressed
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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| Red Leon wrote: |
And you can tell all that without even looking ? I’m impressed |
yes because I was giving a general list of red flags for scam sites, as the grammar of my sentence would make clear.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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My 2¢ worth - as when I'm not flouncing around the mountains I do website stuff.
It's quite bizarre in that there are various red-flags, but not too outrageous, a lot of copy/paste typos in the T&C's / Privacy Policy etc and the About Us does not read well.
I'm confused because I have delved into the code and there's quite an investment there if it is a scam-site, it's certainly something that's not been "spun up" in a few minutes.
The cart integration with the e-commerce side of things using "woocommerce" is quite technical and then there's the quite substantial inventory behind the site across a range of products - all those assets have to be inputted - there's no easy way of doing it.
I have not attempted to buy anything and see how the tech side of things all integrates with payment channels etc
As for the SEO / Google side of things they've used a WordPress Plugin "Rank Math" which quite frankly really ticks a lot of boxes! But even if you use a plugin there's still a lot of other "stuff" that needs to be done, especially for a new domain/site
I actually couldn't find a tel number, well at least on the Contact Page, address is in London, which clashes with some of the American vocabulary on the site.
I personally wouldn't make any purchases from it, but if someone is really interested, then send them a message from the Contact Form on the site, advising them about this thread and see what the response is
PS The Domain was only set up last September
Domain Name: SKISHOTSALE.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2728809109_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2022-09-30T05:55:08Z
Creation Date: 2022-09-30T05:48:01Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2023-09-30T05:48:01Z
PS The domain was only set up last September
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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hmmm interesting.
A few weeks back there was a similar post on the MTB forum many of us use.
That was 100% blatantly obvious that it was a scam site.
Just dragged up that old thread, and went to the skihotsale and bikefamous (both dot com, no www), and the similarities are rather striking. You get a "US" site. Clearly using the same cookie cutter site, right down to the identical footers on both sites, with identical (read: "slightly odd") payment type logos.
The www site claims to be in London. The non-www site in Montana or somewhere.
Interesting mix of British and US spellings or terminology. The Bike site claimed to be in US but sold "Tyres" rather than "Tires", which I found particularly strange.
Scam site? very much so.
A lot of effort populating the stock? remember there's a billion people in China for such menial efforts.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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| davidof wrote: |
| abc wrote: |
| Question is, why does it come up high on google search? Did the scammers figured out how to game google’s search engine? |
what makes you think it does? |
It was on the 1st page when I selected "Shopping" search on Google, maybe the 5th/6th item listed, sandwiched between items from Snowinn and Glisshop.
p.s. It's now top of the list!
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On stock lists... you would just find a legitimate ski shop and programmatically grab their stock list. Doing it manually would be daft, as you have to put the effort in once per product list update, and once per scam "shop". If they did it by hand, there would be typos all over it, especially if they don't understand the language and/or sport, which seems likely. Much better to script it.
Here you can see that they scraped the product names and images because they're precisely correct. Those look to have been merged with post-fix text like: "Unique style", or "Half price". The second being funny, because the products with that text are much cheaper than half price, so their programming isn't very sophisticated. I'm sure there are easily purchasable scripts for crims to scrape html or json for stock lists.
You can tell it was built in September 2022 because all the images are in a WordPress upload directory of that date.
The site's pretty ropey, built on a pile of old tat strung together. But it doesn't have to convince technical people, so that's actually not a problem.
Forums like this are a problem for people like http://www.skishotsale.com/ though.
Right now they may be in google, but soon, this will be in there too, and everyone with google will know what they kind of already knew.
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The interesting thing, to me, is where they pitch the discount. It's got to be cheap enough that punters think they have found a way to beat the system, but not too cheap to make them suspicious.
As @davidof pointed out, if you think it's too good to be true, you know what it is already.
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| It's now top of the list! |
Top of whose list? What you see is not the same as what everyone else sees, your feed is tailored to you, unless you took specific actions to stop that.
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| phil_w wrote: |
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| Quote: |
| It's now top of the list! |
Top of whose list? What you see is not the same as what everyone else sees, your feed is tailored to you, unless you took specific actions to stop that. |
I guess that's true, even though I'm on a VPN and search using Incognito mode, there are ways for Google to know its me.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| luanb wrote: |
| davidof wrote: |
| abc wrote: |
| Question is, why does it come up high on google search? Did the scammers figured out how to game google’s search engine? |
what makes you think it does? |
It was on the 1st page when I selected "Shopping" search on Google, maybe the 5th/6th item listed, sandwiched between items from Snowinn and Glisshop.
p.s. It's now top of the list!
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So not general search.
Yes shopping results are full of scam sites. The shops pay to appear in the results via adwords. Unless it is a reputable shop you can't trust the results and there is no interest from google in cleaning up the results. There is no mechanism to inform google of scam sites.
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| phil_w wrote: |
The site's pretty ropey, built on a pile of old tat strung together. But it doesn't have to convince technical people, so that's actually not a problem. |
it convinced Weathercam, and he's an expert
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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all these scams and frauds rely on people being greedy and/or lazy and/or stupid, don't they? There are so many that it only takes a tiny percentage of the population to qualify for the scammers to make money.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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all these scams and frauds rely on people being greedy and/or lazy and/or stupid, don't they? There are so many that it only takes a tiny percentage of the population to qualify for the scammers to make money.
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These sites know there is is lots of gullible fools who think they are getting a bargain, just try selling a quality product at a realistic price on Ebay and they try and beat you down. these scammers well know the market they are looking at. As numerous posts as have said( If its too cheap beware).
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You know it makes sense.
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| davidof wrote: |
| phil_w wrote: |
The site's pretty ropey, built on a pile of old tat strung together. But it doesn't have to convince technical people, so that's actually not a problem. |
it convinced Weathercam, and he's an expert |
 made me read his post!
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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I just received an email from roberto somebody, purporting to be gov.uk telling me I'm "eligible to recieve a (£400) discount under the Energy Bill Support Scheme".
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Poster: A snowHead
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I'd expect that a competent scammer (and their SEO suggests competence) would built a framework that could be used to spin-up 100s of sites for different product areas, with the 'stock' built (as suggested above) by screen scraping a similar legitimate site. It looks like all the non-product text is entirely generic (which is another red flag - e.g. for an online shop selling skis, I'd expect something in the shipping text to reference specifics for shipping skis).
It's been quite a few years since I've done anything directly with eCommerce sites, but I expect a lot of legitimate sites and built on standard templates, so it shouldn't be that hard to build a script that could be reused to scape a stock list from a whole range of sites. It's also possible that such a script could have evolved from some legitimate code to script conversion of sites from one platform to WordPress
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| pam w wrote: |
| I just received an email from roberto somebody, purporting to be gov.uk telling me I'm "eligible to recieve a (£400) discount under the Energy Bill Support Scheme". |
Lucky you!
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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| phil_w wrote: |
| On stock lists... you would just find a legitimate ski shop and programmatically grab their stock list. Doing it manually would be daft, as you have to put the effort in once per product list update, and once per scam "shop". If they did it by hand, there would be typos all over it, especially if they don't understand the language and/or sport, which seems likely. Much better to script it..... |
That's one feck of an inventory to compile for a scam site and why bother to populate that much stock?
And if they have a program to copy another site's inventory and then link that into the woocommerce engine that's more than a mickey-mouse fudge, and there's some credible back-end scripting going on, chapeau I say!
Like @viv, says there must be ways now
I've done a couple of searches to see what site(s) they could be cloning but there's quite a choice!
However, under ski boots they have a Powerliner Tendy Style now if you Google that, they are the only site to come up for that product, so is that a typo / glitch?
Mind you they haven't been able, or bothered to syphon product descriptions.
As for the site itself, it's built using the Flatsome theme https://flatsome.info/ so a solid template for adaptation used by a lot or sites, and not tat, though does to some degree on the implementation skill sets
And for new sites/domains to do well in General Searches, they have to have what's called a good Domain Authority and that takes a long time to establish with back-links etc and you can't do it in six months - and I'd suggest the Google search algorithms that are for ever-changing will be able to sort the genuine sites out from the scams.
I currently have one site that I've been attempting for a long time to achieve better results even though it's one of the most comprehensive sites there is on travel to Madagascar as we're partners with Air Mada, it's only just recently after offering links to advertisers that our domain authority is going in the right direction, though there are other issues, not least two languages.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| pam w wrote: |
| all these scams and frauds rely on people being greedy and/or lazy and/or stupid, don't they? There are so many that it only takes a tiny percentage of the population to qualify for the scammers to make money. |
Or just normal folks who don't really understand how these things work. Which is plenty.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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| pam w wrote: |
| all these scams and frauds rely on people being greedy and/or lazy and/or stupid, don't they? There are so many that it only takes a tiny percentage of the population to qualify for the scammers to make money. |
Yup. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to gambling adverts, which are designed to extract money from stupid people. But the adverts strongly suggest it's a "clever" thing to do. The Brexit leave advertising I saw made the same pitch.
I was looking at a crypto scam website, helping a relative not fall for it. The pitch shared some of those features.
I know how double glazing people work, and car salesmen, and car rental desk clerks, and they're all essentially trying to suggest that you'd be stupid if you don't do what they want.
Does anyone know of any books which discuss the ways people can be scammed?
I can think of a few ways, but I'm thinking that someone must have done some work on the psychology of it.
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| phil_w wrote: |
| pam w wrote: |
| all these scams and frauds rely on people being greedy and/or lazy and/or stupid, don't they? There are so many that it only takes a tiny percentage of the population to qualify for the scammers to make money. |
Yup. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to gambling adverts, which are designed to extract money from stupid people. But the adverts strongly suggest it's a "clever" thing to do. The Brexit leave advertising I saw made the same pitch.
I was looking at a crypto scam website, helping a relative not fall for it. The pitch shared some of those features.
I know how double glazing people work, and car salesmen, and car rental desk clerks, and they're all essentially trying to suggest that you'd be stupid if you don't do what they want.
Does anyone know of any books which discuss the ways people can be scammed?
I can think of a few ways, but I'm thinking that someone must have done some work on the psychology of it. |
Yes, The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova
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| luanb wrote: |
| The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova |
thanks, got it [following your recommendation, I mean: thanks for the reference, I downloaded it and look forward to reading it]. I'm just curious if I missed some of the vectors.
More generally, post Brexit there seem to be more weird retailers out there in snow sports, and it's not easy to simply order stuff as some have charges and all that. I tend to check here first, because I'm lazy, so I think that's a good thing forums can do, which "review sites" can't - anyone can buy a review, but it's a bit harder to create a persona here with a posting history. For now, at least
Last edited by After all it is free  on Sun 14-05-23 15:39; edited 1 time in total
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| phil_w wrote: |
I was looking at a crypto scam website, helping a relative not fall for it. |
erm, it has the word "crypto" in there, so it is a scam.
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FAQ
