Scam Type
Online Purchase Scam
Business Name Used
www.skishopmall.com
Date Reported
Sep 15, 2022
Victim Postal Code
01027
Total Dollars Lost
0
Scam Description
I placed a purchase on www.skishopmall.com for a jacket with my credit card. The price was a good deal, but not so outrageously low that it was obviously a scam. I saw the same jacket on sale elsewhere, so I figured retailers were cleaning out old stock.
When I hadn’t received an order confirmation after almost a week, I contacted the company through the website’s contact form. No one responded to my message despite the site advertising a team of customer service reps, so I started to look into the business.
I searched for text from their “about us” page and found that the language had been copied verbatim from other sites selling a variety of products. Example: https://www.maudfood.shop/page/about-us.html and https://www.atrlshop.com/page/about-us.html?lang=en compared to https://www.skishopmall.com/about-us/ .
I then took information from their “contact us” page (which has their address as being in Arizona despite the “about us” page saying Alabama) – Google maps could not find the Burnside Court address in Arizona. When I did a web search for the address, I found yet another business that had it listed – https://ronniesale.shop/ . That website’s about us page talks about engineering tech solutions, even though it’s a clothing store, so that points to a scam.
It appears that skishopmall.com is part of a network of websites which use the same language and design to appear legitimate so that the scammers can collect credit card data. I took a screenshot of my order info after I placed it, in case I didn’t receive an email confirmation. It showed that nearly 10,000 orders have been placed through skishopmall.com alone. I imagine there have been thousands of other orders through the scam website network.
When I spoke to my credit card company about my experience, they promptly replaced my card. The scam was obvious to them.
