A fake shop network, and the brands it copies
One operator runs a large number of near-identical online shops. Each one copies a real brand's product photos, description text and page title, sells at a fraction of the real price, and publishes the real brand's own support address — so the people who get charged complain to the brand rather than to the shop. This is the record of what we found. Search for your brand, or browse the whole set.
How to read this, and what it does not prove
Shops in this network are built from one codebase and redeployed per brand, which leaves the same build files, the same placeholder contact details and the same image paths on every copy. We found members by those fingerprints, then fetched each page and read the brand out of it. Every page we fetched is archived, and each archived page has a checksum so a copy we hand you can be verified as the page we actually read.
The brand name is read from the page, not guessed from the domain.
Domain names lie: matwood.shop is a Mattel copy. So attribution uses the
copied page title and the support address the shop publishes.
- Confirmed member
- The domain carries the operator's build fingerprints, so it is a member of the network. Note what this does not say: it confirms membership, not that the brand named beside it is the brand being copied. Those are separate questions, and the brand column carries its own marker when the attribution is weak.
- Likely member
- Sits in the operator's infrastructure but no build artefact was recovered. Treat as a lead.
- Dormant
- Registered and inside the network's footprint, but not resolving when we checked.
- Ruled out
- Checked and ruled out. Kept visible so the negative result is on the record too.
Known limitations, stated plainly. In a hand-checked random sample of 60 entries, the underlying victim was correct in 57 (95%), but in about a quarter of rows the brand label is an SEO title fragment or a store-name suffix rather than a clean brand name — for example a shop copying Roheenaz is labelled with the title text it copied. About 5% name the wrong company outright. Roughly one row in nine carries a public evidence link; for the rest we hold the archived page but have not published it. So: treat a row as a lead worth checking, not as a finding to publish unverified. The re-scan button exists to let you verify one yourself.
Registration dates and registrars are sparse: many .shop registries do
not publish them. An empty cell means we do not know, never that the value is zero.
Showing confirmed members with a brand we could name — the strongest part of the record. Clear the filters, or use “show everything”, to see leads, dormant domains and the entries we checked and ruled out.
| Domain ↕ | Brand named on the page ↕ | Status | Verdict ↕ | Registered ↕ | Registrar | Contact exposed | Actions |
|---|