Fake .shop stores copying European brands: what we found

On 13 October 2026 we looked for fake shops on .shop domains for 276 European consumer brands: clothing, jewellery, cookware, coffee, food and outdoor. For 23 of them we found at least one live fake store using the brand's name, products and copy.

Everything here comes from public data: DNS records, certificate logs and one plain load of each home page. We did not place orders, fill in forms or contact anyone behind these sites. We name no brands on this page.

The numbers

276 brands checked, about ten .shop names each, in two batches. For each name that existed and was not the brand's own, we loaded the home page once.
The first batch of 151 brands gave 36 live fake shops copying 20 brands. The second batch of 125 found 3 more for 3 brands; many of its names did not answer at all that day, so it undercounts.
Usually two to four copies per brand, each on a different name and often on a different host. Two brands had four each.
They stay up. Of the 41 fake shops we had on file on 13 October at 16:08 UTC, 39 still served the same page on 14 October at 19:39 UTC.
More are on the way. On 13 October we noted 29 more brand-named domains on the same networks that showed no page yet. A day later, 25 of them served a shop page carrying the brand's name.
The 13 fakes whose registration records we looked up in detail were registered between April and September 2026, so most were already months old.

How these shops look

Nearly all of them come from one template, which suggests one operator behind many brands:

The real brand's name, product names and product texts, with "Official Online Store" or "Site Officiel" in the title.
Large discounts on everything: "-65 %" or "up to 70 %".
Prices in dollars on pages written in German, French or Spanish.
English blocks left in local-language pages: "Trending Now", "What Our Customers Say".
Five-star reviews with the same reviewer names on shops for unrelated brands.
No Impressum, no company name, no address, no phone number.
Names built from the brand plus one word: brandshop.shop, shopbrand.shop, brandstore.shop, brandofficial.shop, brandonline.shop.

We never order, so we can't say what a buyer receives. What we can say is that the shopper believes they are buying from the brand.

Why one takedown is not enough

Because each brand has several copies on different names and hosts, getting one suspended leaves the others selling. In our data, new copies also appear on the same networks before they go live. So the useful questions for a brand are: how many copies exist today, which ones are new since last week, and has the one we reported actually gone.

If your brand is copied

Look at the page in a private window without typing anything, and save screenshots with the date and time.
Report each name to its registrar and its host, and report the page to Google Safe Browsing, Microsoft and Netcraft so browsers show a warning. Our guide to reporting a lookalike domain has the steps and report texts you can copy.
If the site sits behind Cloudflare, use Cloudflare's abuse form: they pass the report to the real host.
Put a short notice on your own site naming your real address, so customers who search after a bad order find it.
Check again a week later. In our data, shops that went offline were often back within hours.

This is general information, not legal advice.

Is your brand on the list?

Send us your domain and we check it the same way: .shop names and the other common tricks, with DNS, certificate logs and a look at each live page. You get a short report by email within 2 business days, free. If you want us to keep watching, monitoring is 9 euros a month per brand, and every new copy comes with the evidence and the reports already filled in.

Get a free check