Described as ‘ghost stores’ by many, these fraudsters often claim to operate retail locations that do not physically exist, undermining genuine, hard-working Australian retailers and leaving customers disenchanted and out of pocket.
Online scammers are a familiar nightmare for consumers. Whenever you shop online, you’re often running the risk of purchasing knockoff products sold by a business that doesn’t play by the rules.
For legitimate jewellery store owners, the damage runs deeper. Beyond the tarnish these fly-by-night ‘ghost store’ operations leave on consumer trust in the jewellery industry, some scammers are willing to take things further, including stealing product photos and descriptions and promotional social media content.
What is a jeweller to do when their hard-earned reputation is hijacked by a scammer they didn’t even know existed?
When this issue began to receive mainstream media attention earlier this year, Jeweller was contacted by Olivia Deskoski, the owner of Black Star Opal, who had an interesting story to tell. Black Star Opal is a family-owned business that has been involved in the Australian opal industry since 1969. Today, it operates a retail store, The Opal Centre, in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.
Shortly before the all-important holiday trading period last year, Deskoski received an unexpected email.
“I received an email from a gentleman in the US saying ‘I think you should know that there’s a website that has stolen all of your product images and is scamming people’,” Deskoski tells Jeweller.
“It was a surreal experience, seeing hundreds of our photos and product names on someone else’s website. I had never heard of anything like this before. This was right before the ramp-up towards the Christmas and New Year’s sales period, which is a frantic and stressful time for every jewellery business.
“The products were mislabelled, for example, gold-plated products were listed as solid gold products, and the prices were ridiculously low, in addition to multiple buy discounts. The home page imagery looked like an underground coal mining operation - not opal mining - and there were fake customer reviews as well as fake ‘featured in’ media publication claims. I absolutely panicked.”
Upon receiving either a poor-quality product that did not match the description on the scammer’s website or no product at all, many of the victims soon discovered that Black Star Opal was the ‘real deal’ and began to contact Deskoski in search of answers.
“At first, it was extremely overwhelming. People are coming to us for answers, and we’re only just learning about this ourselves,” she explained.
“Fortunately, there was never any issue with our business, our website was never compromised, and we’ve never had any problems with our customers. But we had learned that people are getting scammed by another business that is pretending to sell our products, and naturally, they’re upset and looking for help.”
Deskoski continued: “The whole experience made me feel sick. Christmas is right around the corner, and we are busy running our business, and suddenly, we’re dealing with people who aren’t our customers, who want us to explain something we don’t understand ourselves.”
Master of Puppets
Research by this publication has established that the business responsible for this online fraud has operated under many names, including but not limited to: Opal Origins, Origins Opal, Grace’s Opal, and Outback Opal.
The website and social media of this scammer exhibit many of the typical hallmarks of a ‘ghost store’ scammer, including closing down sales, extreme discounting, and the use of AI-generated imagery and fraudulent backgrounds.
As this article will later explain, finding traces of these websites is difficult today, as Deskoski would go ‘scorched Earth’ in her efforts to eradicate these online retailers from the internet.
Among the scraps is a Facebook account, which claims the business is based in Gibson Desert. The account was created in September 2023 under the name ‘Sobuj’ and was later changed to Origins Opal in November 2024.
The account has a single administrator based in Pakistan and has 4,800 likes and 4,800 followers. Among the remnants of this scam operation is the following social media post.
“After over six decades of mining and crafting Australia’s finest opals, the Barker family of OriginsOpal is preparing to close a cherished chapter of their history,” the post reads.
“But every story reaches its final page, and now it’s time for our family to say goodbye to the business we’ve built with love and dedication. Before we do, we’re offering up to 70% off our entire collection of genuine, handcrafted opal jewelry. Each piece captures the magic of opal and reflects our family’s enduring heritage.
“This is your last opportunity to own a piece of the OriginsOpal story. Once we close, our opals will never be mined or crafted by our hands again. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry a part of our legacy with you!”
The website [opal-origins.com] was registered on 28 November 2024 with the domain provider NameCheap, which conceals the registration information of the owner.
Fight Fire With Fire
Over the coming months, Black Star Opal would use whatever means possible to wipe these fake businesses from the internet.
Filing DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices proved the most effective strategy. This involves submitting complaints to host providers, search engines, and social media platforms regarding content that infringes on their terms of service or policies.
Reporting the issue to the e-commerce platform Shopify was another step in the process, as was requesting that Google remove infringing websites from search results. Flagging the accounts on Instagram and Facebook was also important.
“It’s a long story to tell because we tried so many different avenues to stop these websites from operating. Fortunately, the individual who alerted me to the issue was very helpful, particularly concerning DMCA takedown notices,” Deskoski explains.
“It was particularly shocking to learn that the scammer was using Shopify, because we use that platform as well. You would hope that they would have more control over this sort of thing, but obviously, they oversee millions of e-commerce websites, and that must be difficult to manage.
“Some of the avenues we explored were ineffective; others worked well. Long story short, the DMCA takedown notices were by far the most effective method for shutting down the scam sites. But once we issued one takedown notice, another scam site would pop up overnight with the same content, sometimes even going so far as to watermark our images with their website name.”
She added: “We also implemented geo-blocking measures on our website to limit the amount of traffic from countries well-known to be the source of scammers, as well as limiting the ability to copy-paste our content.”
Going Undercover
During her campaign, Deskoski also used social media to distribute warnings on Facebook and Instagram, encouraging consumers to avoid these specific websites and to perform more research. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
She also contacted the scammers directly multiple times, which, unsurprisingly, was a fruitless endeavour. Frustrated with the lack of response to legal threats, she posed as a consumer.
“Very late one night, I decided to pretend to be a customer with questions about their products. They eventually responded, and so I told them that I knew who they were and repeated some legal threats. They were probably on to the fifth version of their scam site using my images by then,” she explains.
“I was in the middle of writing my following email, and I had the site open in a browser. Suddenly, in real time, I could see my content being taken down and replaced with images they’d taken from a competitor’s website. I immediately contacted that business to let them know what was happening. It was another surreal experience.
“Knowing that I’m communicating from Australia with these scammers, and seeing that somewhere else in the world, at the same time, they’re making changes to the website, it was bizarre.”
Much of the advertising these scammers performed on Facebook and Instagram was concealed from Deskoski due to geo-blocking. The target market appeared to be US consumers.
Many of the complaints directed to Black Star Opal regarding the scammer came from US consumers. During one conversation, a consumer revealed that she was aware of scammers who had attempted to profit from the wildfires in Southern California in January.
Across four weeks, a series of destructive wildfires tore through Los Angeles, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and killing 30 people. More than 18,000 buildings were destroyed, and this consumer revealed that many scammers had established retail websites and social media accounts claiming that they had lost a business in the fire and that by shopping with them, they would be supporting a company dealing with tragic misfortune.
As mentioned, the Origins Opal Facebook account has a relatively large following and, more importantly, a high level of engagement. One of the remaining posts has nearly 1,000 ‘likes’, dozens of comments, and shares.
This is an unusually robust interaction for a scam account.
Taking a closer look at ‘who’ interacted with this post is revealing. Most of the accounts repeat the same adjective – “beautiful”. There are also many comments sexualising the image of three AI-generated men in a paddock.
Many scammers use an ‘army’ of fake accounts to lend authenticity to a post or page. Given that so many of these comments are repetitive and unusual, this appears to be what is happening in this case.
With that said, an examination of the ‘bot’ accounts themselves is interesting. Many of the accounts include a post repeating the same claim: “It’s my birthday, and I’m encouraging my friends to donate to a fundraiser or charity.”
Among these causes mentioned are Doctors Without Borders, Stop Soldier Suicide, the Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and even the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation.
This is reportedly a common social media scam. Fake charity pages are created using stolen or AI-generated images and emotional sob stories to attract attention. A network of fake accounts is used to promote the posts, creating the illusion of legitimacy.
Real users, misled by the fake engagement, are encouraged to donate through fraudulent links or untraceable payment methods. In this instance, it appears to be a scam within a scam. The network of fake accounts seems to be used to promote fake online retail businesses and fraudulent charity causes simultaneously.
Scammers are capable of chewing gum and walking at the same time!
Fade to Black
The damage inflicted by these digital scammers is two-fold. Legitimate jewellery stores are undermined, and consumers are left out of pocket and disenchanted.
Deskoski said that while she was grateful for what she’s learned during the experience, at the end of the day, it was an ordeal.
“I don’t know what this scammer is up to today. I don’t know if they’re still running some opal jewellery scam, or perhaps they’ve moved on to something else,” she explained.
“I know that there are many issues with scammers doing the same thing with pearls, and the use of AI images for jewellery shop scams now seems to be on the rise, which I guess is easier to skirt the copyright infringement issues that see scam sites taken down. Fortunately, our actual business was never compromised by anything that happened; there are no issues with our website, and our customers are happy.
“Unfortunately, as important as it is to understand how to handle this problem, you can’t spend all of your time on it. You’ve still got a jewellery business to run and staff and customers that rely on you.”
These frustrations are perhaps best encapsulated by one response from a customer to a warning Deskoski posted on Facebook: “I wish I had read this before I got ripped off.”
Most of the scammers identified in this investigation avoid confrontation and refuse to answer questions about their business and its conduct.
With that said, Jeweller has encountered an online retailer that was willing to offer a justification for their practices – and that will be detailed in a subsequent report.
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