is alibaba.com a safe and authentic site for online shopping?
i wanna buy a dress...plz help
2012-05-15 00:28:40
Answers
1 Answers
Buffy Staffordshire
100% scam.
That is a fake website pretending to sell cheap merchandise.
Any site that advertises merchandise cheaper than the official manufacture's website is a fake site shipping gosh awful crappy knock-offs or simply collecting cash and not even bothering to ship fakes.
The pictures on the site look like the real merchandise because those pictures ARE of the official merchandise. Those pictures were stolen from the official manufacture's website. If you receive anything at all, which is doubtful, it will not resemble those pretty pictures at all.
The payment options say it all, Western Union, moneygram, paypal and bank transfer. The credit card icons are just there for show, that site does not accept credit cards, only anonymous cash payments.
Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.
Paypal can only get your money back if there is money left in the scammer's paypal-linked bank account. Scammers know this and will immediately withdrawal your money and disappear. No money in the scammer's paypal-linked bank account means absolutely no possibility of refund for you.
Your bank can only get your money back if there is money left in the scammer's bank account. Scammers know this and will immediately withdrawal the money you transferred. No money in the account means absolutely no possibility of you getting your hard-earned cash back.
In all seriousness, when something goes wrong, what will you do? Send an email that is ignored and blocked? Send chat requests until you are ip banned? Call internationally and speak fluent Chinese?
The UPS, TNT and DHL icons are there only to take up space, that site only ships with EMS, the Chinese post office, good luck getting the "tracking number" they give you to work on the EMS website. You will need even more luck trying to contact EMS when your tracking stops and your "package" is lost somewhere.
You could then be really lucky, your "package" is discovered, seized by "customs" and all you need to do is pay even more money via Western Union or moneygram to the "custom's official" who uses a free email address just like that site has a free email address as its contact information.
Free email addresses are easy to open and close completely anonymously.
If you google "alibaba seller scam", alibab.com Western Union scam" or something similar, you will find hundreds of posts of people who were scammed trying to by cheap merchandise from alibaba.com.
