Watchesaholic Is A Scam And Why You Should Avoid Them

Watchesaholic review, it’s a scam everyone!

Some of you may have noticed the adverts popping up all over your Facebook, or perhaps friends of yours tagging you to show you their latest offers. Looks too good to be true right? Well as always, it is. Watchesaholic sells fakes and we’ll be providing proof in the article, what we’ve done to try and stop them and how you could help.

 

How Watchesaholic first came to my attention

A few weeks back a friend of mine messaged me on Facebook showing me a print screen of one of Watchesaholic Facebook adverts. He was asking ‘do these seem legit to you?‘ he knew I would be the best person to ask considering the area I work in. I quickly got to work checking the site out, I notice the products seemed too cheap, that’s an obvious warning sign for most. If you’re undercutting everyone by a considerably amount in the watch industry for a popular brand, something is normally up.

I then went on to checking their site details, established back in 1986 apparently, yet their site has only been around since the 4th of January 2016, another clear warning sign. 

MVMT warn against buying from Watchesaholic

I then did what I’m sure many of you have done and went to Google, well it’s safe to say a lot of people were complaining. The biggest piece of evidence is MVMT watches warning their customers not to buy from Watchesaholic. Here’s the link to that post. If you don’t know of MVMT, they are a massively popular watch brand.

 

The people of Reddit warn against them

When you come to the Reddit page you’ll be inundated with warnings about how Watchesaholic is a scam, you’ll find the post here.

I’m not going to post an image here as It’s hard to get all the comments in, but do have a read through and you’ll see what I’m saying. Watchesaholic is actively monitoring for this sort of content as it seems some suspicious accounts were set up that day to act like satisfied customers, safe to say to Reddit community spotted them from a mile away.

 

What we’re doing to help stop them

The first step is of course making people aware. This article should serve as a first line of defence warning people of the reality that Watchesaholic is a scam. Hopefully people who use google to check will be made aware of this issue and not buy. But sadly this doesn’t help the people who don’t check.

We’ve notified Facebook (Watchesaholic primary advertising platform) and complained about their page, Facebook are allowing Watchesaholic to run an aggressive advertising campaign on their platform which is why so many people are seeing the ads, and with the extra profit in selling fakes they can afford to do this a lot. The problem is, often until there are a substantial amount of complaints, nothing is going to be acted upon by Facebook as it’s unlikely a real person has even read the complaint yet.

We’ve also notified Shopify (Watchesaholic website shopping platform). Watchesaholic uses the Shopify platform to host their shop. While Shopify itself is a really good company, it’s a shame that they’ve let this site continue using their platform to scam honest hard working people. I was on live chat to the Shopify staff to warn them of this issue, they said they would ‘look into it’ yet still, a month later nothing has been done. I honestly thought Shopify would actually do something, guess I was wrong.

We’ve gone after their guest posts (Articles written by Watchesaholic, posted on other sites who allow guest posting.) Some websites have allowed guest posts by Watchesaholic, and in all honesty they were unlikely aware that they were a scam so I don’t blame them for initially posting the articles that promote the company. The owners of the sites have now been made aware, and I’ve given them proof of the matter, and instructed them they should take the articles down to protect their own companies reputation. Hopefully if these get taken down, when you Google the company you won’t come across articles promoting them. You sure as hell won’t find any of us decent watch communities promoting them.

 

How you can help

There are a few ways you can help people avoid this scam, just knowing is the first step. If a friend asks you about watchesaholic, you can warn them to avoid straight away. Sharing this article on your social media would also be a big help as it will make more people aware.

If their ad pops up on your Facebook wall, comment on it either linking to here, or just warning people they are fakes. Your comment will likely be deleted within time (I’m blocked by them now), but you may stop at least one person from getting scammed.

You can head over to their Facebook page and complain/report the page.  Hopefully if enough people do this, Facebook will take their page down.

 

Have something to add?

If you’ve been scammed by the company, tell us your experience in the comments section below. Also if you have any extra ideas on how to stop websites like this, we’d appreciate your input.

Concluding

Obviously it’s impossible to stop every site that scams people like this, the fact my close friends were seeing their ads, and having seen the amount of people on Facebook commenting about buying one, I was quite frankly pissed off enough to go after them and try and stop this happening to people. Hopefully we can bring a stop to people being scammed by Watchesaholic.