How to avoid internet crooks when purchasing a gun online
Dollar-inflation high prices and supply shortages of many kinds of guns (including replica muzzleloaders) led to a surge of false ads on the Internet.
Crooks electronically “cut and paste” gun photos from genuine online sources, then invent their own attractive ads with “great bargain” prices to spur hasty buying.
When they get payment, the site disappears along with your money. Another variation is a fake “auction” site showing previous low “bid(s)” that they made up. If you submit any bid, they respond that you “won”, take your money, and vanish. Disguised roundabout relays resist tracing.
Scam Clues and “Red Flags”:
Low prices or “auction bids” excite you to buy or bid quickly before missing “great bargain”. (NOT!)
“Tax-free” is intended to encourage buying, but most legitimate businesses now require sales tax.
“Duty-free” likely indicates an overseas writer, and it is best to avoid any foreign transaction.
Payment required by PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, Zelle, BitCoin, etc., but credit cards not accepted. PayPal and others like above are same as sending cash, no recourse for fraud, no refund, nothing. Scammers usually don’t take payment by credit cards because cards are traceable (but some scams “accept” credit cards just to get your data to resell for more sophisticated cybercrooks’ exploitation).
Online “store” that doesn’t accept credit cards is likely scam. Most real businesses do use credit cards.
No telephone contact, likely to dodge revealing poor English or foreign accents which are “Red Flags”.
Awkward or partial sentences, misspellings, or unusual words resulting from translation software.
Latin words are default text in WordPress website builder. Crooks often overlook some line(s) in Latin.
> Error(s) in gun specification or description. Most scammers know little or nothing about actual guns.
> Different backgrounds in photos purportedly of same gun, likely “cut & pasted” from several sources.
Google Search to Detect “Cut & Pasted” False Online Ads or Sites.
Lazy cybercrooks just “recycle” whatever pictures and wording they can find most quickly on legitimate auction or dealers' websites. Fortunately, shoppers can use Google search engine to identify photos or text that have been electronically “cut and pasted” from other online sources.
Google search photos: Right-click on photo. Click copy image address. Go to images.Google.com Click on camera icon. Click on paste image URL. Right-click in text box. Click paste. Click enter. Scroll down to see results. Photo matches from legitimate websites reveal copying by scammer.
Text checking is best done on a sentence or two which ought to be unique to the gun offered, or unique to that website such as the “About Us” description of their business. Scammers don't write out new text, they just copy whole sections from other website(s), which still can be identified by Google search.
Google search text: Highlight and copy a sentence that ought to be unique. > Paste into search bar on Google, then enter. Check results for identical match(es), often re-used many times by lazy scammer. Using all of the above “Clues”, “Red Flags”, and Google searches enables you to avoid online gun scams.