How to spot a scam Facebook or Instagram fashion ad
Have you ever bought something from a Facebook or Instagram ad, only to be bitterly disappointed? Either your purchase doesn’t arrive, or if it does, it looks nothing like the photo? The chances are, you’ve fallen for a Facebook or Instagram fashion scam.
It’s easily done. Earlier this year my mum called to tell me she’d found a real bargain. She’d clicked on a sale ad for the fashion brand Roman and bought £200 of clothes for £40. Straight away I was suspicious – it seemed too good to be true. So I asked her for the website and checked it out.
The first thing I noticed was that Roman was spelt Romann in their URL, which immediately indicated it probably wasn’t legit. Then I checked the website on Whois Lookup and discovered the domain was only a few weeks old, which confirmed it.
Luckily for my mum the clothes never arrived and she was able to do a chargeback through her bank to recover her money. But not everyone is able to get their money back.
Online fashion scams are rife
Online fashion scams are very popular and successful right now. Research by Ofcom discovered that 87% of online adults in the UK have come across content they suspected to be a scam or fraud. And, according to Norton, “fake e-stores that sell clothing attract the most traffic. Examining the most- frequented scam sites in the top 10 countries reveals that clothing, particularly women’s apparel, is the primary lure in eight out of these 10 nations.”
So how can you protect yourself and avoid falling for a Facebook or Instagram fashion scam? The easiest answer is not to buy anything from a social media ad, and certainly never to click through to a store from one. But there are lots of legitimate businesses that rely on social media ads to reach customers.
The realistic answer then is to turn detective before parting with your hard-earned money. And to help you, I am going to show you six quick and easy things to do before buying from a store you have found via a social media ad. And you MUST do this, even if you think you are clicking through to a well known and trusted brand name.
1) Check the domain on Whois Lookup
The first step is to look the URL of the website up on Whois Lookup. This is a free tool that will show you when the domain was created. Why is this important? Because most stores will have been around a long time – at least a couple of years. I would not trust a business whose domain was just a few months old.
This is especially important if the Facebook ad lures you in with the classic ‘closing down’ sale story, as this website does:
Funny how they claim to have been trading for 12 years, given their website is only 44 days old:
Even if a business doesn’t claim to be closing down, if their domain is less than a year old, I would not buy from them.
2) Check out their reviews on Trustpilot
Before I buy any products from a new online store now, I always check the company out on Trustpilot. I click on any one-star reviews and see what complaints people have – whether they are one-off issues, or whether many people complain about the same issue.
If there are one or two complaints and the company responds appropriately, rather than a generic ’email us so we can help’, I might consider buying from them. But if there are a few comments criticising their late deliveries, faulty products or poor customer service, I won’t spend my money with them – even if they are offering a bargain price. (In fact, it’s usually the companies who tempt you in with bargain prices who are more likely to not deliver.)
If you can’t find the company on there at all, that is a red flag – especially if they claim to have been in business a few years. Personally, if I can’t verify that other customers have had a consistently good experience with a business, I won’t trust them with an online purchase.
3) Check out their website
Often scammers are lazy, and you can usually catch them out in the details. Here’s a screenshot from another website I found via a Facebook ad:
The website URL is wearchloe.com, but as you can see their email address is info@chloeandliamcs.com. This could be a lazy oversight, and they formerly were using the latter URL but it’s been penalised in some way so they have changed it, and forgot to update the email address on this website.
Both URLs are new: wearechloe.com was registered in May 2025, and chloeandliamcs.com was registered in March 2025, which is another giveaway of a potential scam.
The business purports on the surface to be British, with a UK phone number and currency, but their address is in Italy. On their very minimal, generic ‘About’ page, they claim to be owned by “GAE company” and “offices are based in: Bologna – Italy”. We can find no record of an Italian company called ‘GAE’ and the address they list is not an office but a small house in the countryside:
When you call the UK phone number, it immediately switches to an overseas ring tone, and goes unanswered to a generic, American-voiced answerphone message.
And remember Clark Boutique? Here’s what they say about the business on their homepage:
As you can see, they claim to be a British family-owned boutique, and even have a photo of the ‘owner’, Judith Clark outside their shop. But on their terms of service, they admit they are a Hong Kong-based company:
While there’s nothing wrong with an overseas business selling to the UK market, any inconsistent details, lack of professionalism and even downright lies would put me off of buying from them.
4) Check their returns policy
If you don’t like the products when they arrive or they don’t fit, you will need to return them for a refund, and often you will be responsible for paying for the cost of the return. Even assuming the seller is ethical and actually refunds you, it’s a hassle returning products, and potentially expensive.
If a seller isn’t ethical and you need to resort to a chargeback or disputed transaction, your bank will usually expect you to provide evidence you returned the products and attempted resolution with the seller.
This is why it’s important to check out a company’s returns policy before you buy. For example, the wearechloe.com website states:
“Our headquarters are based in Bologna, Italy, and our return processing is handled by our partner warehouse in China. The correct return address will be provided by email once your return request is approved.
Please contact us before returning your order so we can provide the correct address. Returns sent to the wrong address different from our Chinese partner may take longer to process.
If you prefer not to return your item due to shipping costs, we may offer a partial refund as an alternative solution. This option is voluntary and does not affect your statutory rights to a full refund upon return.”
As you can see, they admit to shipping from China. This tells you two important things:
- They don’t actually handle the goods themselves. They’re a ghost business using drop shipping to sell products from manufacturers in China. They probably have never even seen what they actually sell. So the chances are it’s a cheap product you probably will want to return.
- If you need to return the product you will need to pay for it to be shipped to China, which can be expensive. They even admit that the shipping costs may be high!
So before you buy anything from an online store, consider what happens if you don’t like it, it doesn’t fit, or it’s not what it appeared to be. You’ll need to return it and will probably be responsible for the shipping costs. You’ll also need to trust that the vendor is ethical.
For me, any company that dresses itself up as a boutique from your country, but really ships from China, with the responsibility and cost of returning products placed on you, isn’t a business I’d trust with my money.
5) Do a reverse image search of their products
It’s disappointing when you have paid a lot of money for what looks, from the social media ads and website, like a high quality product, only to receive a cheaply-made piece of tat. So before you buy a product, download the image of the product and then do a reverse image search of it.
What you find might surprise you. Check out the pink-heeled shoes here:
Reduced from £167 to £54.95, they seem like a bargain. But not when you do a reverse image search, and find them on AliExpress for just £18.59:
No shoe you can buy from AliExpress for less than £20 is going to be worth £55, so you’re pretty much setting yourself up for disappointment.
I get that businesses buy products wholesale and then sell them retail for a profit. But the issue here is the deception. They are pretending to be a family-run, high-end, established online boutique, when really they’re a hastily created website selling cheap AliExpress products for a high markup.
wearechloe.com claims that their products are personally designed and manufactured by them as part of a “crafted process”:
The truth? Products like these shoes, which are reduced from £144.50 to £89.99:
Are really from AliExpress and cost just £8.30:
6) Check their social media
The final clue, if the other red flags weren’t enough to put you off buying from a social media ad, is to check out the companies actual social profiles.
On the wearchloe.com website, they have these videos by influencers. The inference is that they are modelling the brands’ products:
However, if you look up these Instagram accounts, none of them actually exist. I can only assume they have stolen someone’s content, added their text to the image and used a fake Instagram name. If you are a legitimate business, why would you bother lying?
Their social media accounts will also only go back a few months – usually around the date their domain was created – which is another giveaway that this is a temporary business, not the established brand it would like you to think.
And don’t assume that just because they have lots of followers and likes and comments that they are genuine. It’s very easy and cheap to buy followers, likes and comments today from legitimate looking accounts.
Be VERY wary before buying from a social media ad
Facebook and Instagram ads can be tempting – especially when they are selling stylish products at low prices. And at first glance, these companies can look reassuringly legitimate. But scratch below the surface and it’s not hard to spot the signs of a scam.
So next time you are considering buying from an online company you don’t know, or even from a brand you think you know but for unbelievably low prices, do these six quick checks. Hopefully you’ll save yourself a frustrating and costly lesson!
