When Purchasing Products Online, be Careful on

Fraudulent Shopping Malls

- Thoroughly check on shopping mall (website) credibility, contacts and others -

    Shopping through overseas online websites has various benefits such as buying rare products at a relatively lower cost or consumers have various options in choosing items. However, consumers who are not used to using foreign websites might fall into the victim to fake websites that extra caution is required.

    Korea Consumer Agency (www.kca.go.kr) announced that for this year’s first quarter, the number of counseling cases on overseas online shopping mall reported through ‘1372 consumer counseling center’ was 74 cases in total.

* ‘1372 consumer counseling center’ run by Fair Trade Commission is the only government run call-center that involves consumer group, Korea consumer agency, local government on real time to file reported complains and damages.

· Increase in complaints about delivery and defects

    By looking at complain reasons of consumers from Jan to March of this year, delivery issues such as ‘delay or damage in delivery’ ranked the highest with accounting for 33.8%. ‘cancellation, refund, delay, or rejection’ (20.3%), ‘Defected and warranty(16.2%), ‘Not available contact info· website shut down’ (8.1%), and ‘refund and cancellation fee’ (8.1%) followed.

     When compared to the figure of 2015 4th quarter,‘Cancel· refund delay or rejection’, and ‘Not available contact info· website shut down’ related complaining cases decreased while complaints on ‘Defected and warranty’, and ‘Fees on refund and cancellation’ have increased.

    Depending on categories, the percentages differ. For example, there was ‘clothes, shoes’(27.0%), ‘IT· electronic devices (computer, cellular phone, and others)’(16.2%), ‘accessories(bags·accessories and others)’(14.9%), ‘hobby products(books, toy, sports appliances)’(13.5%) related complaints were reported.

· Extra caution needed when purchasing through overseas online websites

    Recently, there are many cases that consumers who are not used to purchasing products directly through online shopping mall are exposed to fraudulent websites when they search for goods with model names or product names through the internet. Those fraudulent online shopping malls seem to lure consumers by using the word ‘luxury’, ‘popular brand’, ‘advanced countries (uk (united kingdom), au (Austria)) and others in their online address. One of the characteristics of those fraudulent sites is that payments are made with different currency such as USD, Yuan, KRW and others regardless of which country website runs on. Also, most of those websites deliver their goods from China. Before placing an order, it is difficult to find problems but consumers need to be extra careful because there is no contact to request for refund, cancellation, or change. Thus, this makes it difficult for consumers to get compensation.

    In order to prevent such cases in advance, consumers need to thoroughly check on credibility of a website, information (address, contacts and others) and see if there are any consumers who have fall victim to the website. Consumers are recommended to use internet service that checks credibility of overseas online shopping mall (website). This would ensure the safe online shopping to customers.

    Since Oct. 2015, Korea Consumer Agency is currently running 『Cross border consumer transaction consumer portal site (http://crossborder.kca.go.kr) 』as one of government measures 3.0 to protect consumers who purchase products from overseas websites by providing information on safe purchase. Therefore, in order to avoid following damages caused by overseas direct purchase, refer to ‘Guideline for overseas direct purchase customers’ and ‘Check lists of protecting damages from overseas direct purchase’ posted on the corresponding website.