Beware of These Sketchy Online Vape Shops

This blog post is a work in progress...

Over the past year or so I've been coming across a slew of online vape shops that show up in Google searches, mainly older gear. The sites all look the same with some variations. The main giveaway is that their logos are all the same generic logos (with a few minor variations) and do not reflect the name of the site (no branding whatsoever, and businesses know that branding is important - Marketing 101). I've never tried to bother to purchase from one but these just scream "SCAM!" because there are so many of them and are all basically similar in that low-effort sort of way. They all seem to use the free Open Cart shopping cart system, but the average internet user would never know that and it also does not indicated a scam site, as Open Cart is a well-known, free, open source cart system (as opposed to the popular Shopify which is a closed, paid-for, hosted system). I would not be surprised if these sites are all run by a single group.

They are fairly easy to spot in google because the favicon in the search result is the generic Open Cart favicon shown for Open Cart sites when you don't upload your own favicon to the server. However, some legit Open Cart sites do show up with this generic Open Cart favicon simply because they never made a custom favicon (example: smokstore.com), so it's not a good indicator of a scam/sketchy site. It is however a similarity among all these sites which, along with the other similarities, allows you to identify and avoid them. I believe they are scams or at least need to be avoided (too many legit sites out there to bother with taking a chance).

Example search result with generic cart favicon (click image to enlarge):



UPDATE 4/21/2024 - I attempted checkout on a few of these sites. All the sites I tested only offer paypal and there are 2 paypal options. The second Paypal option option never works but the first option does and takes you to a real Paypal payment page showing the same recipient, Juliane Tobiassen (@JulianeTobiassen9).



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So here's a list of sites I've found so far that I believe are probably scam sites. If not scams, sketchy at best.
Categorized by the logo they use:

I'll add any new ones I come across to this list but this is enough to study and understand why they are sketchy or scams.