The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: alfsauve on March 18, 2025, 08:27:24 AM
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Don’t fall victim. Bad actors are posting all sorts of warehouse liquidation sales and they are fake.
Seems that sporting goods, especially guns and ammo, are their specialty this month. I’d have fallen for the S&W one, but I got so many including SIG and CCI and Nosler all at one time it was obvious they weren’t real.
If it seems too good to be true, then it’s probably a scam.
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Add to that a Palmetto State Armory “online” one where everything must go.
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Since they only ship fedex and fedex is horrible out here I dropped my account with PSA. Still, I hate to hear of people being scammed....
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PSA has sales every day. If you go to their site, I don't know how anyone can scam you.
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PSA has sales every day. If you go to their site, I don't know how anyone can scam you.
It's a pop-up ad. Looks legit until you look at the web address.
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It's a pop-up ad. Looks legit until you look at the web address.
Maybe that's why I haven't seen it. I've always used a pop-up blocker, on every browser, on every computer to block ads like that. Plus if I click on anything suspicious Malwarebytes blocks it, and warns me that it's a phishing site, has a trojan, or malvertising, or whatever else it is. Like earlier tonight, I don't know what I clicked on but it blocked the site because of a Trojan. Not the condom, but the kind that really f****s you. :D
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Just to be clear.
The scams are not the company's that are being mis-represented themselves. PSA isn't scamming anybody, but somebody is using their name and logo to create a almost too good to be true clearance sale web site. Then they are going on Facebook, using email and other social media to posts links to the scam site.
So if you see a "warehouse sale everything must go", don't click on the link but manually go to the website of the company and see if it's really true.
Scammer caught a lot of people hard with the JoAnn's going out of business sales. They advertised, for example, items at up to 90% off. And it was really good because people who put in an order got daily shipping updates. For about a week. Then the site and the updates just disappeared, as did of course their money.
Again, it's not Palmetto State Armory themselves, it's scammers using their logo and a similar web address like palmettostatearmory.online <don't go to this link>
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Before you click on a link, hover your pointer over it to see what web address it shows. If it's the wrong name, or the right name but wrong domain, like .co or .net when it should be .com, you know it's a scam without even clicking on it. If you don't have a good anti-virus program, you can still get Malwarebytes Browser Guard for Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Edge for free. The version at the Chrome store works on other Chromium based browsers, like Vivaldi and Brave. It blocks third-party trackers, malicious programs and code, scams including phishing, suspicious top level domains (TLDs), and it protects your credit card number on checkout pages. I don't use Browser Guard on my computers because I have the full Malwarebytes anti-virus, anti-malware, and privacy premium protection program. You can get a free download of it too, for a 14-day trial, and the virus scanners for Windows and Mac are always free. Computer experts always recommend that first if they think your computer is infected. It will get rid of any type of virus, etc. there is.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/browserguard
https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download
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Another one popped up today on Facebook. REAL DEALS is the Facebook identity purporting to take you to PSA warehouse clearance.
SCAM -- I reported them to Facebook.
Four ways to tell.
1) The picture they used may have come off of PSA's web site, but the signage has been photoshopped in. It's crooked, the edges are too sharp, the language isn't in English and the price is slightly crooked.
2) The link take you to a "dot SHOP" top level domain and PSA real web site is "dot COM"
3) On the real PSA web site, there are no such going out of business deals.
4) The deals are too good to be true, e.g., CCI MiniMags for < $2/100. Winchester 9mm for $5/250
BEWARE OF THESE FAKE DEALS.
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Another one popped up today on Facebook. REAL DEALS is the Facebook identity purporting to take you to PSA warehouse clearance.
SCAM -- I reported them to Facebook.
Four ways to tell.
1) The picture they used may have come off of PSA's web site, but the signage has been photoshopped in. It's crooked, the edges are too sharp, the language isn't in English and the price is slightly crooked.
2) The link take you to a "dot SHOP" top level domain and PSA real web site is "dot COM"
3) On the real PSA web site, there are no such going out of business deals.
4) The deals are too good to be true, e.g., CCI MiniMags for < $2/100. Winchester 9mm for $5/250
BEWARE OF THESE FAKE DEALS.
Like I said previously, before you click on a link, hover your pointer over it to see what web address it shows. If it's the wrong name, or the right name but wrong domain, like .co or .net when it should be .com, you know it's a scam without even clicking on it. I don't thnk I've ever seen a .shop TLD. I get phishing emails from so many different countries I have to look up .whatever to see what country that domain is. Some of them are easy to guess without looking them up. Others are really hard to guess. BTW, .pt is the internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Portugal. That was one of them I didn't guess. The one for Russia is .ru which makes a lot of sense.
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Yeah, I almost got scammed right after Christmas, Sig Sauer closeout sale. EVERYTHING looked kosher, the prices were too good to be true, and about 4-5 clicks in, the URL changed to something really weird - not even close to anything Sig or purchasing-related, so I bailed.
Interestingly, for about 2 weeks, I got emails reminding me of the bargains, and urging me to finish the order. Those I deleted quickly.
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I got a phishing email today that I knew was a scam but I wanted to see what they were up to. It said Important Update: Your Social Security Statement, but came from someone at alaskawonders.com. The link they wanted me to click on was something created by an URL shortener like Bitly, but even shorter. It was from the world's shortest URL shortener, T.LY. So I copied the shortened URL and found out they make an URL Expander Tool so you can see what it really links to. If you go there you can enter the short link I was sent, https: //t.ly/sg0tp, and see what it really is. It redirects to alovelycalling dot com with a .php script. I've seen .php links before but still don't understand what they are. Then it redirects again to socialbenefits-updater dot com/socialsecurity/. It then yields an HTTP 403 status code, meaning access to the requested resource is forbidden. The server understood the request, but will not fulfill it, if it was correct.
There's an example on the site, https: //t.ly/OYXL, that when you expand it is https: //chromewebstore.google dot com/detail/url-shortener/oodfdmglhbbkkcngodjjagblikmoegpa. If you're ever curious about what any of the shortened URLs really are, this URL expander works better than several others I tried today. They have a bunch of other tools, but I haven't looked to see what they are yet. It seems to be a legit company, but some people using the URL shorteners are, to put it politely, bad operators. I could think of several other choice words to call them but 'm keeping it civilized. :)
https://t.ly/tools/link-expander