Best Sites to Find Available Scammers
We’ve all been there: you find the perfect product, chair or skin cream that will solve all your problems through the liberal application of capitalism, but it doesn’t fit into your budget . You have three options: you can spend the next few months (years?) saving money diligently, waiting for the glorious day when you can afford to pull the trigger; you can put that purchase on a credit card and deal with the interest – or you can find the scammer.
Dupes – short for “duplicates” – are having their moment. While counterfeits are nothing new, as anyone who’s ever purchased a “designer” handbag on the streets of New York can attest, dupes are a little different. Counterfeits try to fool people by claiming they are a name brand product, but the scams are their own thing: they don’t pretend to be expensive products, they simply copy their appearance and functionality at a lower price.
Finding scammers can be as easy as a Google image search or a quick trip to Target or Lidl, but sometimes it can be a challenge. Luckily, there are a variety of apps you can use that make finding counterfeits much easier, as well as companies that create their own counterfeits for specific items.
How to scour the web for scammers
If you’re looking for duplicate furniture and household items, you can spend hours scouring subreddits and Facebook pages, but luckily there are tools and sites that make it much easier. Some of the most useful include:
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TikTok . The social media giant is something of a hub for deception these days. You can type in the name of what you’re looking for using hashtags like #dupe or #dupefinder to see what’s out there. What’s great about using TikTok is that most of the results will show what people are actually using and discussing about the scams, which can help you figure out if they’re actually worth buying.
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Dupe.com has been getting a lot of press lately thanks to the love it’s been receiving on social media. Its interface is pretty simple: you paste the URL of an item (furniture, household items, or clothing) or drag and drop an image into the search bar, and Dupe searches the Internet for lookalikes. For example, if you want the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman from Herman Miller, which sells for $6,000 to $8,000 new, Dupe.com will quickly take you to Walmart, where you can buy that leather lounge chair with a very similar look and feel. (There is also an app .)
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Spoken.io works very similarly: paste a URL or drag/upload a photo and it will crawl the internet and point you to a list of discounted duplicates. For example, an Eames-style chair was found for $1,899 —not as cheap as the Walmart version, but still a significant savings over the original.
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Dupeshop specializes in skincare and cosmetics products, and it doesn’t just point you to links to buy—it compiles detailed comparisons, reviews, videos, and other information so you can be sure the dupe product will perform as expected.
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SkinSkool is different in that it offers a list of potential cheaters, organized by similarity scale and marked with a dollar sign indicating how expensive the scam is. This makes it easy to match your budget with the available options. The site explicitly states that it bases its selections solely on publicly available product ingredient lists, so it does not offer any kind of hands-on review.
Several companies that make their own decoys
Some companies have made a name for themselves because they produce and sell their own high-quality copies so you don’t have to search all over the Internet for them. Here are some examples:
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Brandefy was founded to take advantage of the fact that brand name cosmetics and skin care products at every price point are largely made in the same facilities using the same ingredients. He creates “inspired” products that are often indistinguishable from more expensive versions. However, Brandefy is more focused on its app than its website, so it’s a good choice if you want to check something on your phone while you go shopping.
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Both Essence Vault and Dossier offer counterfeit perfumes. Developing, producing and packaging perfume is expensive, but you can’t actually copyright a scent, so fake perfumes tend to be uncannily similar to the expensive brand they’re copying. That being said, you may notice a difference in quality between the good stuff and the dupes. But if you’re on a budget, both The Essence Vault and Dossier offer scents clearly inspired by designer scents (Dossier also sells its own original scents).
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Element Brooklyn offers soaps, lotions and other products that beat brands like Aesop or Le Labo to their eco-friendliness: Their products are refillable, so you don’t have to constantly throw plastic bottles into the landfill.
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Quince is taking the same approach as Brandefy, but for apparel, saying it uses the same factories and manufacturers as the high-end luxury brands it copies.
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Italic is a Los Angeles-based company that sells clothing, jewelry and accessories that closely resemble luxury brands. Its prices aren’t as low as its regular counterparts, but you can still find fashionable clothing that looks just like top-tier brands for a much lower price.
Some Cautions to Keep in Mind
Keep in mind that it can be difficult to judge whether a decoy is worth buying even at a significantly lower price. For example, it can be very difficult to determine from a photograph whether a piece of furniture or clothing will be even close to the quality of the real thing. This is where apps like TikTok, which offer endorsements from people who have actually used cheats, can be very valuable.
Another option for doing your due diligence on beauty and skin care products is SkinSort , which has a useful comparison tool . You can compare the dupe to the brand it’s copying, and SkinSort will show you a list of the ingredients of each (along with explanations of what each one does) and reviews from people who have actually used the dupe.
Finally, if you want to save some money without risking a lower appraisal, you can also look for name-brand items at thrift stores like Poshmark , which sells clothing, skin care, fragrance, and beauty products. Many sellers on these platforms have access to name-brand items (some work for retailers where they get big discounts, giving them the opportunity to profit from resale, for example – look for people who have a lot of a particular product on hand and you’re probably looking for a fussy seller), and you can find some real bargains this way. This gives you the main benefit of the scam (lower prices) without any of the damage.