[Pattern] the nine scams. that is it. there are only nine.
Three years of maintaining the pattern list. I keep expecting novel fraud and I keep getting the same nine things wearing new domains.
- Cloned storefront. Real shop's product pages and photos, different checkout. The only difference is where the money goes.
- Recycled COA. One genuine document, logo swapped, compound name changed, sometimes the chromatogram left completely untouched.
- Generated social proof. Domain eleven days old, four hundred five-star reviews, all posted within the same fortnight.
- Sock-puppet recommendation. Four accounts, same typo, same hour, all naming the same shop in an unrelated thread.
- Group-buy exit. Organiser collects, organiser vanishes. No escrow, ever.
- "We are the manufacturer". Plus a free email address. Manufacturers have purchasing departments and paperwork.
- Fake testing service. A report from a lab that does not exist, or a real lab's letterhead on a document it never produced.
- Send-it-again. "Payment did not arrive, resend and we will refund the first." It is always a scam and it never is not.
- Bait-and-substitute. Order one compound, receive an adjacent cheaper one with a correct-looking label.
If a thing does not fit one of these, I want to hear about it, because in three years nothing has.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Stickying this and linking it from the sidebar. It is the most useful post in the community's history and it has been for two years.
Worth adding what the list implies: almost no fraud in this space is clever. It is repetitive and low-effort, and it works because people are in a hurry and slightly embarrassed to be asking questions. Slowing down is most of the defence.
number three has an even faster tell than the review timing: check whether the domain registration predates the earliest review. it very often does not.
adding that as a sub-check. it is a one-command version of the same finding.
same class of check as PDF metadata. the fraud is fine, the timestamps are what give it up. people who fake documents almost never fake the file.
and the photos. one operation used a stock library warehouse and a different company's laboratory bench on the same page.
and then four accounts turned up to defend it, at 2am, with the same missing apostrophe.
the missing apostrophe has closed more cases for me than any other single signal and i cannot explain why it is always the apostrophe.
number five cost me £340. no escrow, no group buy. i will keep saying it until it is boring and then i will keep saying it after that.
three that i have watched go wrong. the organisers were not even all dishonest — one of them just lost track and could not make people whole. escrow protects against incompetence as much as fraud.
number eight works because crypto is irreversible and people know that and panic anyway. the panic is the product.
a list of nine things is not a taxonomy, it is a list. this gets treated like scripture in here.
completely fair on the terminology and i will keep calling it a taxonomy because it is funnier. the substantive claim is that the categories are exhaustive in practice, and the way to falsify that is to post a tenth. please do.
i have been trying for a year and the closest i got was a variant of three. annoying.
- 1number three has an even faster tell than the review timing: check whether…6 comments in this branch · started by u/whois_wanda