Macy’s Home Shop Scam
Author: Trend Micro
Who doesn’t love clearance sales and big discounts? If you’ve recently been searching for the best bargains online, chances are you might have come across a “Macy’s Home Shop” or “Macy’s Home Sale” ad on Facebook. Beware! These ads could be SCAMs. Keep on reading for more details on these Macy’s home shop scams and tips on how to spot such fake Facebook ads.
Macy’s Home Shop Scam
We’ve found several Facebook ads promoting Macy’s 70% off clearance sales and outlet sales, featuring discounts on products such as UGG slippers and home furniture:
Sample Macy’s Home Shop Scam ad (1/2). Source; Facebook Sample Macy’s Home Shop Scam ad (2/2). Source; Facebook
Fake Macy’s Websites
The ads lead to different websites, but they are all copycat versions of the legitimate Macy’s site (macys.com). Below is an example:
Macy Home Shop Scam – macystorehomes[.]com
Sample URLs of Fake Macy’s Websites
- Macy-outletsr[.]com
- Macy-home[.]com
- Macy-sales[.]com
- Outletsalemacys[.]com
- Macyoutlets[.]com
- Macystorehomes[.]com
Note: The legitimate Macy’s website is macys.com. Anything other than this is not an official one. Be careful!
The genuine Macy’s website – macys.com
Scam Site Red Flags
Countless fake websites appear every day, so you need to always be on the lookout. Here are some things to watch out for:
- A copycat web address. Search on Google for the official one and compare.
- Too-good-to-be-true deals.
- A very recent site registration date – you can check a site’s age quickly using Whois lookup. For example, macystorehomes[.]com was created just about 1 month ago:
Source: Whois
- Bad reputation. Check the verdict from ScamAdviser. The website macy-outletsr[.]com has a Trustscore rating of just 1 out of 100, for example:
Source: ScamAdviser
- Lack of customer reviews or only lots of 5-star ones.
- Suspicious Facebook page transparency info. You can check a page’s transparency info to see if it was recently created or if the page content was recently changed.
We recommend you avoid interacting with these Macy’s clearance or outlet websites and any related Facebook pages. Always shop on the official site (macys.com) to stay protected!
For more tips on how to check if a website is safe to use, please check out this article.
Shop Safely Online
The truth is, there are lots of scams and scam sites on the internet and they’re getting even more difficult to detect with common sense alone. However, for an easy and reliable method of detecting and avoiding scam sites, check out Trend Micro ID Protection (for free!).
ID Protection can shield you from scams, fake and malware-infected websites, dangerous emails, phishing links, and lots more! If you come across something risky online, you’ll be alerted in real-time so you’ll know to stay well clear.
This article was published in collaboration with Trend Micro
Image Source: Unsplash.com
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