Beware of fraudulent websites!
Be careful which sites you visit! Some are nothing more than shop windows for well-organised scammers.
We came across an e-commerce site called meilleurlampes.com.
That site had copied the Vraiment Beau catalogue in full detail: products, photos, descriptions—even the product references had been lifted. That is obviously very easy to do, since all of that information is naturally available directly in a browser.
The site only lasted a few weeks. But many scammers (especially in China) automatically create thousands of rough copies of e-commerce sites (see this Orange article:
Yet every product was offered for under €100, regardless of its real value. That alone should set alarm bells ringing: we are in a good position to know that this has nothing to do with the real prices of these products. And it is inconceivable that this company could have produced copies of all these light fixtures, even with “miracles” in China. So it was clearly a scam.
The site also mentioned no brands and claimed to ship from nine warehouses in the United States—probably copied from a US clothing site.
The site listed no legal company name or SIRET number, which violates French law. The only address given, in Nantes, does not exist.
The host, also not listed, was Cloudflare in the United States, but only as an intermediary. The site was actually hosted in South Africa by a company called “Fibergrid” based in Johannesburg, which claims to operate data centres worldwide. Curiously, this host’s “legal” page does not work.
If you went further and tried to buy a product by clicking the PayPal button, you were sent to a page that asked you to click a new PayPal button again. That page belonged to a clothing site in Xianshi, China, variously called “shuanprivate.shop”, “jiongmodern.shop”, or probably several other names.
All of these are flashing red lights. If you kept going and clicked again, your PayPal account would probably have been debited directly from China—perhaps even without PayPal being aware of it.
If you chose credit card payment, you were asked to enter your card details, then redirected several times: www.fordcloth.shop/fosopay/senven/checkoutpay.php, then wzapor.life/dayspay/v2/pea_a/return.php, then eleanhal.shop/paycheckout/redirect.php, then safety6.com/api/returnUrl, and finally www.marykelleyshop.site/payment/success.php.
marykelleyshop.site looks exactly like meilleurlampes.com but claims to sell clothing. It also appears to be hosted in South Africa after routing through Grand Cayman. If you try several times, you land on different sites. Hundreds of these sites are created every day, and their owners freely bounce traffic between them to cover their tracks.
Your credit card details probably do not disappear into a void—and you will receive neither light fixtures nor clothes.
What can a site like ours (or our suppliers) do? Not much against this kind of site. We:
Filed a report on the French government’s Pharos platform, which exists for these cases (reference
93cf931b27)Notified PayPal—their only payment method, including for credit card options—of the suspected fraud
Contacted Dynabot, which manages their domain, to inform them of the issue
Submitted feedback to Google to alert them
Sent a DMCA “Take Down Notice” to the only contact listed on the site, “admin@meilleurlampes.com”—an address that does not exist, incidentally
Obviously, these actions can only have limited impact. If they did affect this site by chance, the owner could spin up the same site again within hours under another name and with another host.
Unfortunately, this kind of behaviour is common in the luxury sector, especially clothing. It is very easy to pull off with a simple site “scraper”. It never requires access to the code or non-public data of the scraped site. As you know, we have also been very careful never to handle your payment data (cards, etc.), so you are safe when you use our site. Bargain hunters are the ones who fall into the trap. In the end, customers must stay alert and learn to spot these increasingly common scams.
So this is a textbook case. Stay vigilant—the warning signs are there. And do report them to Google and the authorities. (https://www.internet-signalement.gouv.fr/PharosS1/etape/escroquerie)
Vraiment Beau