Warning against fake shops

Since the beginning of the year, we have received an increasing number of reports about "fake shops", which we would like to warn you about at this point.

How does a fake shop operate?

A fake shop is an attempt to defraud. The site operator / perpetrator imitates the brand image of a well-known company in order to make the buyer believe that he is on the company's website. For this purpose, contents of the original website of the imitated company are copied in order to create the appearance of a legitimate company. The products offered there are advertised with very high discounts to tempt the buyer into a supposed bargain purchase.

What happens when an order is placed?

As soon as a buyer places an order, his money is most likely lost. No goods will be shipped. The site operator will immediately transfer the amount received to other accounts in order to disguise the flow of money.

How to recognise a fake shop

There are a few points by which you can tell if the offer is a scam.

The most obvious indicator in our case is the offer price. At TWIN BUSCH, all items in our range are calculated with a very low margin, so offers with savings of 10%, 20%, 30% and upwards for our products are unrealistic.

Another important point of reference is our corporate design. All the webshops we operate (twinbusch.de, twinbusch.es, twinbusch.fr, twinbusch.it, twinbusch.nl, twinbusch.co.uk and twinbusch.com) are based on the same page layout and differ only slightly visually. If you are on a website that is advertised as a TWIN BUSCH website but differs significantly from our design, it is most likely a fake!

Our domain address is also a good hint: We always use the spelling "twinbusch" with the corresponding country code as the main domain for a country (we also have domains with other spellings, but these always redirect to the main domain of the corresponding country).

An imprint that is difficult to find and does not conform to the law (missing information on the management, missing entry in the commercial register, missing VAT ID, mobile phone number instead of landline, etc.) are all good signs of a fake shop.

What we do against fake shops

Every fake shop that comes to our attention is immediately reported to the German police for prosecution as well as to the responsible hosting and domain providers, payment providers and search engines. Unfortunately, these agencies need some time to obtain the final deletion of a fake shop. Time in which the fake shop can continue to cause damage.

Example of a fake shop

The fake shops that have come to our attention so far all used the same design and clearly originate from the same perpetrator. We have already successfully had some of these shops removed, including twinbuch.com, twinbusch.shop, twinbuschshop.fr and twinbuschde.com. You can see a screenshot of the layout used here: