The bogus boutiques ripping off shoppers

It’s such a shame. Rising costs have forced Ivy Luna UK– an independent shop named after its mother and daughter owners – to clear its stylish and elegant collection and prepare for a new chapter. Go on then. You select a knitted cardigan, reduced from £99.95 to £34.95, and wait excitedly for it to arrive.

And wait. Three weeks later, a parcel turns up, but as soon as you open it, the facade fully unravels. Inside is a cardigan, sure, but instead of an intricately knitted garment, it has a badly printed knitting pattern on it – not at all stylish or elegant.

This is a rising type of shopping hazard, involving dodgy sellers using slick websites to trick shoppers into buying sub-par goods typically shipped from China.

Citizens Advice says it helped consumers with a fashion purchase every seven minutes, on average, in 2025, finding that ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) makes it easier for dodgy shops ‘to trick people into buying items that look nothing like the images advertised’. It said that 82% of complaints it sees about clothes, shoes and accessories related to online orders, and one in 13 involved scams, including shoppers thinking they were buying items from UK-based companies.

We investigated how these dodgy shops operate and how to avoid getting conned.

Expectation vs reality

We found 20 suspect sites claiming to be independent shops, most stating they are UK-based. The sites listed women’s and men’s clothing and shoes, accessories, jewellery and in some cases homewares including wallpaper and art prints.

We were able to identify that these shops are potentially misleading shoppers, using reverse image searches to find the same products on marketplace sites including Aliexpress, Amazon and Temu, as well as checking customer reviews on Trustpilot.

We attempted to order eight items from six seemingly dodgy shops –Avery & Scott, Clara London, Hudson Grace, Ivy Luna, NinaNicole UK and Oliver & Grace London. Hudson Grace was flagged by our researcher’s bank as being a suspected scam, while for Avery & Scott, there was a problem with the payment. For the remaining four shops we placed orders with, we had no idea if anything would turn up. 

Eventually, they did, some as much as four full weeks after ordering. All were shipped from China, and none matched the imagery or description.

A knitted cardigan was, in fact, made entirely of polyester with a print of a knitted pattern on it, and two supposedly linen and cotton shirts were 95% polyester and 5% spandex. The knitted jumpers we ordered were 100% polyester and were poorly made with zigzagging stitching and saggy, baggy sleeves and collars.  

The clothes we ordered came to £200. When we compared the prices found on online marketplaces for what appeared to be the same items, we found they could have been bought for less than £40. It’s not a giant profit for the dodgy sellers, but – with enough people falling for it – the money adds up.

We tried to contact the shops we bought from. 

Ivy Luna UK told us that it's a legitimate business that works with a trusted third-party fulfillment partner in China in order to offer a wider range of designs at more accessible prices. It said it is committed to providing quality products and a positive customer experience.

Hudson Grace (now known as Hudson Claye) said that it is a legitimate business that works with international suppliers and fulfilment partners in order to offer a wide range of products at competitive prices. It says that it clearly communicates policies, including shipping times, returns, and store credit options, and aims to support customers fairly and transparently throughout their shopping experience. It said it actively assists customers with refunds, returns, and order-related issues.

The other shops either didn't respond or no longer exist. 

• Find out more: how to spot an online shopping scam

Building a bogus boutique

Creating a convincing website used to be resource-intensive, but easy-to-use e-commerce website builders, such as Shopify (used by 11 of the sites in our investigation), combined with AI, have made it easier than ever to create a slick storefront that feels like a legitimate business. Many stores we looked at claimed to have been in business for 10 or more years, although the page source reveals that most of the websites have only existed for a few months.

Once a shopper is convinced by the legitimacy of the site, sellers then use a variety of tactics to get them to buy. The ‘about us’ pages are littered with stories to pull at the heartstrings – businesses built from a dream between mother and daughter, or family-run shops forced to close due to hard times.

Elsewhere, we saw sites leaning heavily on claims of UK roots, including one, Marlow York, that pictured a traditional-looking shopfront within York city walls with the store name on the sign. Another site showed men wearing wax-style jackets in a Cotswolds village.  

They then apply pressure tactics such as time-limited sales (often closing down or anniversary), with countdown clocks and ‘limited stock’ tags. Ivy Luna had a ‘revival’ sale countdown timer that refreshed each day, for example. Reviews on the sites often give a 4.7 or 4.8-star rating based on thousands of reviews, but the link to the reviews site goes nowhere.

• Find out more: how to spot a fake review

The dropshipping model

The sellers behind these shopping sites use a dropshipping fulfilment model. This means that they don’t have the stock but instead send orders to a third-party supplier, usually in China, which then ships the goods to a customer. This practice isn’t in itself misleading, and it’s used on plenty of e-commerce sites.

The difference between legitimate retailers and the fake boutiques is that they seem to be selling under false pretences that customers feel misled by. They tend to use AI-generated imagery that doesn’t match the item you receive. Or they claim an item has features it doesn’t (for example, that it’s 100% linen when it’s polyester), and present the business as something it’s not. 

• Find out more: what you need to know about online marketplaces before you buy

The role of social media

It’s becoming increasingly common for people to discover products they want to buy through social media, via paid-for ads or member-generated content such as posts and business pages. Paid-for ads on platforms like Facebook are the perfect place for sellers to promote bogus closing-down sales, or simply to target shoppers they know are interested in clothing.

We found one shop in our investigation – Avery & Rose– that had posted more than 2,500 sponsored ads on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, all since July 2025 and most by October that year. Multiple posts advertised a closing-down sale, with one saying ‘after 26 memorable years of being part of this community, our family business is closing its doors’, and others saying goodbye to their beloved designer, entering retirement. We compared this to a genuine boutique store, which had 170 ads for the same period. 

Avery & Rose doesn’t exist at Companies House, and there’s no record of it in the locations claimed (we checked Manchester and Galway). It appears the website has been taken down, although the Avery & Rose page still exists on Facebook. It took less than a minute to dismantle its claims, but sponsored posts have appeared on Meta as recently as February. We contacted Meta, but it didn’t provide a comment.

• Find out more: 10% of Meta's revenue came from scam ads in 2024

Case study

'I thought I was supporting a small UK business'

When Heather Harris (pictured) saw the perfect linen blouse for her holiday advertised on Facebook, she was pleased to see it was from a small UK business. It claimed to be a boutique named after its owners, Sylvia and Grace, who had a childhood dream of opening a clothes shop.

Heather was so pleased with the bargain that she ordered two of the blouses (in two sizes to be sure), and paid £120. It’s only when the tracking information appeared that she knew she’d made a mistake – the shipment was coming from China, and a check on Trustpilot confirmed her fears that the shop wasn’t what it claimed. Weeks later, the clothes arrived – not the tops she’d expected, but ‘horrible items’ made of poor-quality material that didn’t match the images.

Heather contacted Sylvia and Grace about returning her order. She was told that returns were expensive, so they’d offer her a 15% refund ‘as a gesture of goodwill’, and she could keep the goods. After refusing this, the business offered a 50% refund. Eventually, Heather was given a returns address in China. The shipping cost her £27, but the parcel never made it out of customs in China.

Five months later, the parcel was sent back to Heather, and she still hasn’t had a refund from the sellers, although she did get the money back from her bank.

Ridiculous returns

All of the sites we looked at claimed to offer 30-day returns, but none provided a returns address, and none of the items we ordered contained a returns label. You have to contact the company directly to arrange it, and as Heather Harris found out, that’s when the problems really start. The sellers are reluctant to offer refunds, saying that shipping to China is expensive, and they tend to offer partial refunds if you keep the goods.

We also looked at the Trustpilot reviews for seven of the sites and found them filled with frustrated people who felt scammed after returning items at a significant cost to themselves, only to see them sitting in customs for months. Most never received their money back from the sellers, although some had got their money back by other routes.

key information

What to do if you buy from a dodgy retailer 

Chiara Cavaglieri, Which? senior researcher says: 'If you’ve paid a bogus boutique, ignore offers of partial refunds or demands to pay to ship items back to China. Raise a dispute with your card provider to say you think you’ve been scammed.

'Share any details of false claims, similar complaints from other shoppers, and photos that show the goods are ‘significantly not as described’. Chargeback covers card disputes for defective and ‘not-as-described’ goods. It isn’t as strong as Section 75, a legal credit card protection covering items costing more than £100, though. PayPal has its own Buyer Protection. 

'The worst of these dodgy shops are set up by criminals harvesting card details, so your bank may need to cancel your card and issue a new one. If you’re unhappy with how it handles your claim, you must complain to it first. If you’re not satisfied with its response, you can escalate your case to the Financial Ombudsman Service.'

• Find out more: I want to return my goods, what are my rights?

What’s being done?

Most people discover dodgy shops via social media. Under the Online Safety Act (OSA), platforms will be required to prevent and remove fraudulent advertising. But due to continued delays with the enforcement of these rules by the regulator Ofcom, platforms will likely not be held accountable for scam ads until at least 2027.

We’re concerned that many more shoppers will fall victim during that time. We want the OSA’s measures on fraudulent advertising to be implemented, so that Ofcom can take action against tech firms that fail to stop scams on their platforms.

How to avoid a bogus boutique

• Look at the reviews - Don’t take the reviews on a retailer’s site at face value. Look at other review sites to see what customers are saying. If the business has a large number of five-star reviews, read entries with four stars and below, too. 
• Research the image - Do a reverse image search by right-clicking a product picture on a website and selecting ‘search this image with Google Lens’ or ‘search this page/tab with Google Lens’. This will show you where else the image appears online.
• Read the small print -  Many fake retailers claim to offer 30-day returns. See if you can find any actual details about how to return a product. Any wording that suggests you need to email them for the returns address should be a red flag.
• Use AI chatbots -  Either select an image from the site of the ‘owners’, for example, or paste the URL into the chatbot. Ask it to look for signs of AI use in the images, signs of dropshipping and when the site was started.

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