Wellbuymall.com: A Fake E-Commerce Site That Duped Thousands Of Indian Customers

As the e-commerce platforms in India prepare for record revenues during the festive season, multiple fraudulent e-commerce companies have flourished. Wellbuymall.com is one such website that has defrauded thousands of Indian customers.

The portal, which is currently inoperative, duped people into purchasing technology products just to vanish once orders were placed and money was received. The URL of wellbuymall.com currently redirects users to a message, written in the Chinese language that reads: “Site Not Found. Your request did not find the corresponding site in the webserver!"

As reported, one of the victims, Sujeet Verma, posted on scamadviser.com: "I have ordered and paid online but no response and they did not deliver the ordered item. They are FRAUD."

Another customer, Sunil Gupta said: "I ordered an SSD (solid state drive/ solid-state storage device) and paid online. This website is fraud but unfortunately supported by Facebook and all advertisements are displayed on my Facebook account. After paying, no responses from website."

Ayush, a user from Gurgaon, recently ordered a mini-pocket charger for cellphones for Rs 1,668, only to discover that his shipment will never arrive. He has now filed a case with the Gurguram Police Cyber Crime Cell against the fraudulent e-commerce website.

As reported by IANS, what actually happened was that the marketer established a Facebook Page or Profile and started selling through it, redirecting people to the fake site. Once they received payment for the orders, they reportedly took their time dispatching the products. By the time Facebook completed its feedback process to determine whether the advertiser was legitimate or a scam, the fraudsters had made quick money and shut down their operations after the platform declared them to be cyber offenders and marked them as "unhealthy."

According to cyber specialists, Facebook's procedure for gathering user input and determining the "health" of an advertiser's Page takes approximately a month, which is plenty of time for cybercriminals to defraud people and leave.

Rajshekhar Rajaharia, who is an independent cyber security researcher, said: "Facebook has a slow customer feedback process to declare an advertiser 'not fit' and act on the advertiser as part of its terms and conditions. Fraudsters take advantage of this and con innocent Indians before they are declared 'unhealthy' and blocked on Facebook and Instagram Pages."

He also said that these con artists pay small amounts of money to market their items on Facebook Pages, show phoney and low-cost Chinese products as real on their e-commerce platforms and deceive customers.

Since the demand for online shopping has increased in recent years, mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was expected that several newbies will try to explore the e-commerce sector, while some scamsters will try to take advantage of the situation.

In January, Mumbai police busted a fake online shopping racket and arrested one person. At that time, the police said that the racket had defrauded over 22,000 individuals out of over Rs 70 lakh by selling household items such as jewellery and clothing materials. As reported, like the latest incident, to attract customers, the scamsters promoted their items on Facebook.

Additionally, the Mumbai Police Department had released a list of 12 fake shopping websites that are part of the shopping scam and are run by fraudsters.

However, in August this year, another report said that the cyber division of the Delhi Police had arrested five individuals after uncovering a three-year scam in which numerous bogus e-commerce websites were used to defraud more than 10,000 people out of Rs 25 crore.

Rajaharia has advised people that "the only way to avoid falling prey to such fake e-commerce platforms is to trust the leading ones like Flipkart, Amazon etc., and shop online via them".