Seven scam patterns and how to check each one

This niche has a trust problem, and the distrust is fully deserved, because enough people have taken money and vanished. So the rational default for a new buyer is to assume every shop is a scam. That default hurts buyers too, because they end up choosing on gut feeling instead of evidence. Gut feeling is exactly what a good scam is built to satisfy. Below are seven patterns with a check for each one, and every check takes a browser tab and a couple of minutes. No vendor is named, and the checks work on us exactly as well.

Seven patterns to check before you pay

All seven take under twenty minutes in total. Run the one-minute checks first, because the cheapest checks eliminate the most sites.

Which two tools do most of the work?

Domain age and certificate history are the two hardest things for a new operation to fake, and both are public. ICANN's lookup tool returns registration data for a domain. Certificate transparency logs are a public, append-only record of every TLS certificate issued. They show when a hostname first came into being, even if the registration data sits behind a privacy service.

A third useful tool is the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, where you paste a shop's URL and look at the earliest capture. If a site claims years of trading but has no captures before last month, that answers your question. The same method works on a status page, and it is how you catch a board that was green for its whole history until someone started asking.

Why the payment method matters

Payment is where the loss actually happens, and this market runs heavily on irreversible payments, partly for structural rather than sinister reasons. Conventional processors decline the category, so the usual consumer protection of a chargeback is often not available. Plan for its absence instead of assuming it exists.

• Assume an irreversible payment really is irreversible, and decide how much you are willing to lose before you pay, not after.
• Buy the smallest item first, because it is a cheap way to test whether delivery, keys and support actually work.
• Be suspicious of pressure, such as countdown timers, a discount that expires in minutes, or a push to pay outside the shop's own checkout. All of it is designed to stop you from spending twenty minutes on the checks above.
• End the transaction if you are asked to pay a person rather than a business, or pushed to switch to a different payment method partway through. There is no good reason for either.

Why we share these checks

We publish this out of self-interest: when buyers cannot tell one shop from another, nobody can build a reputation. That is bad for any vendor who intends to still be here in three years. Every check above can be run against this store, and for several of them we would rather you ran the check than took our word for it. If we ever fail one, the checklist is still correct and the fault is ours.