What to Do if You Bought From a Scam Website
The thing that most decides whether you get your money back is how quickly you start. Dispute rights run on deadlines, and several of them are counted from the order date rather than from the day you realised something was wrong.
1. Stop anything still running
Cancel any subscription, saved card authorisation or recurring payment with the merchant before you do anything else. If you handed over card details on a site you now distrust, treat the card as compromised and ask your bank to reissue it — a fraudulent merchant with working card details is a continuing problem, not a closed one.
2. Save the evidence now, not later
Fraudulent storefronts disappear, and so does the evidence. Before you contact anyone, capture:
- The order confirmation and any receipt or payment reference
- Screenshots of the product listing, the price, and any delivery promise
- Every email or chat message, including the ones that went unanswered
- The URL, and a copy of any tracking number you were given
A dispute is much stronger when you can show what you were promised and when. If the site is already gone, check whether the Internet Archive captured the listing.
3. Go to your payment provider — this is where the money is
Contacting the merchant again is usually the least productive step. Your leverage is with whoever moved the money.
Credit card
The strongest position. Card schemes let you raise a chargeback for goods that never arrived or were materially not as described. In the US, the Fair Credit Billing Act generally gives you 60 days from the statement showing the charge, though card networks often allow longer for non-delivery. In the UK, chargeback is typically available for around 120 days, and Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act can make the card provider jointly liable for credit-card purchases roughly between £100 and £30,000 — which is a stronger and separate right worth naming explicitly when you call. Deadlines are often counted from the expected delivery date, so say so if delivery was promised for a later date.
Debit card
Weaker than credit but not nothing — Visa and Mastercard chargeback rules generally still apply. What you usually lose is the statutory joint-liability protection that credit purchases carry. Ask your bank specifically for a chargeback, not just to “report fraud”, which can route you into a slower process.
PayPal and similar platforms
PayPal Buyer Protection generally allows a dispute within 180 days for items that did not arrive or were significantly not as described. Open it inside the platform rather than by email so it is formally logged.
Bank transfer, crypto, or gift cards
Be prepared for a poor outcome: these are chosen by fraudulent merchants precisely because they are hard to reverse. Contact your bank immediately anyway — UK banks operate a reimbursement scheme for authorised push payment fraud, and some banks elsewhere will attempt a recall if you act within hours. Report it regardless, because the record matters even when the money does not come back.
4. Report it
- US — the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and the FBI's IC3 at ic3.gov
- UK — Action Fraud, or Police Scotland if you are in Scotland
- Canada — the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre
- Australia — Scamwatch, run by the ACCC
Reporting rarely recovers your own money directly. It matters because it is how repeated merchants get identified, and because a filed report sometimes strengthens a bank dispute.
5. Expect the pressure tactics
Two things happen often enough to warn about. Some merchants offer a partial refund — 30% or so — in exchange for closing the dispute or removing a review; accepting can forfeit the fuller claim. And being scammed once puts you on lists sold to others, so treat any unsolicited “recovery service” offering to retrieve your money for an upfront fee as a second attempt on your money.
Before the next order
The check that would most often have caught it is looking at what the page's code does rather than what it says — fabricated urgency and purchase notices are implemented in the browser and visible to anyone who looks. We cover how in how to check if a website is real.
This is general information, not legal or financial advice, and consumer protection rules vary by country and change over time. Confirm the current deadlines and rights with your own bank, card issuer or national consumer body — they are the ones who decide your case.