Scam site?

UKworkshop.co.uk

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JBaz

Established Member
UKW Supporter
Joined
22 Jun 2020
Messages
133
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202
Location
Ratcliffe on the Wreake, Leicestershire
I have just had to cancel my credit card to stop the purchase of a universal grinder on drillpresssales.com going through.

I believe this to be a scam site.

The site claims to be selling Warco products (a genuine UK company selling machine tools - I have one, so I know them) but the header logo is wrong, though the correct logo appears on many pages across the site.

I have confirmed with Warco that drillpresssales.com is nothing to do with them.

The alarm bells started to ring when the site asked me to log into PayPal after I had just entered my cc details. I then checked the address and it is a residential apartment in Salford. The item I bought was a on "sale" at £98, reduced from £300+. I subsequently discovered that the actual product from Warco is over £800.

I have checked the internet for any scam reports but can't find any.

I have reported the site to the NCSC.
 
This is likely a case of if it looks too good to be true, then it's not true. I quickly scanned the "About us" page of the website, and it looks like a bad cut and paste job from another scam site. The phrase "We offer the latest fashion ingredients by our design team;" doesn't appear to be related to drill presses.

The WHOIS information about the site indicates it was created earlier this month and is based in China. The rest of the registrant information is blocked by privacy settings. Also, the contact email is the admin for another site based in China.
 
There is one golden rule in online shopping: check the term & conditions. Any decent seller will have company details in there. Legit and genuine details, traceable. Then check the Contact page. This website lists this address on their contact page: [email protected] and this one in their About Us section: [email protected]. The first is non-existent, the second belongs to a different shop which clearly is a clone of this one. Or vice-versa.

Further on, chinese are notorious for manipulating the image of what they sell. This website lists a ton of furniture at prices which are virtually unrealistic. But from the images I'd suspect they are actually selling plans. There is a chance they are legit, but 100% not trustworthy imo and I would never ever ever buy from them.
 
My company network will not let me visit the site, our IT police are excellent and I often use this as my acid test on if I should trust a site.
 
My anti-virus won't allow access to the site as it's infected with malware.

Don't even look.
 
Can't see any chance it's legit IMHO.
I don't even know how to put this into words. The way many Chinese sellers see conducting business with westerners is weird at least. I'll sketch a short comparison. In my country we have gypsies, some of which would come to ask for work. If you make the mistake of taking them in to give them work without knowing how to deal with them, it goes awry. You say what work needs to be done and you are given a price. They claim it's the total price. After a short time they come to you and tell you the work is done. You go check and obviously it's not, just a small portion. And their reply is something like 'we obviously agreed to that portion alone, how could you imagine we would do everything for that amount of money? No, everything will cost xy', where xy is 5 times the money.
If any of you visited aliexpress (since they became agressive and compulsive in trying to bring visitors to their website at any cost), then you know in the ads you see a product listed for a price so small that it's completely incredible. But when you check the listing you find out that the amount of money is actually for another accessory or something like that and if you want that product you saw it actually costs so much more.

Some of their shops and platforms started with this approach I don't know exactly how much time ago. I've interacted with them a lot, bought stuff from Alibaba as well. It was still a pain in the ass to get 100% you pay for what you think you pay, but they used to be much more decent. I suspect this behavior is a consequence of the pandemics, followed by the war, because their western sales clearly dropped a lot. They don't understand that this approach would ultimately cause them to loose customers because some of us feel they are lieing to us or trying to make a fool of us. And many of them actually can't understand. It's a cultural difference. As weird it can be for us to see business like that, it is weird for them not see business like that.

Beats me if there isanything legit on this website. It's clear that most of their products are actually plans and I doubt the plans are extensive enough.
 
Run through Scam Advisor and Trend Micro and got this

Negative highlights

The website's owner is hiding his identity on WHOIS using a paid service

This website does not have many visitors

We discoved the website is served from a high risk country

This website has only been registered recently.

This website is not trusted by Trend Micro
 
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