Every week we have customers sending screenshots of sites out there offering amazing discounts on MAAP apparel, purporting to be us. Some fakes are pretty easy to spot, others less so.
Here are some tips to help spot a shop that is not us:
- This is the only website we sell on. If it doesn't have maap.cc as part of the site address then it's not us. For example maap.cc/us is our USA online store, but maapsuperdiscount.com is a fake.
- We have a number of retail partners around the world, you can check out a list of them here https://maap.cc/pages/stockist. Many retailers on this list have websites they sell on legitimately and they worthy of your trust.
- We only take major credit cards or our gift cards as a form of payment. If you're being asked to pay by PayID, PayPal, Bitcoin or iTunes vouchers the site is a fake.
- Our sale items are only available in the Archive section of our website, we don't lead our homepage with massively discounted items.
- How does it look? Our website and social media has a consistent design and feel, and we don't lead with massive discounts.
- Who posted the ad? Check out the account behind the post. In Instagram we only have sell links on our official account @maap.cc
What to do if you've paid money to one of these fake sites?
- We'd suggest lodging a chargeback with the financial institution that issued your form of payment. All credit card companies make it easy to report a payment to a scam site, and if you do it quickly you're likely to get your money back and you're making it harder for them to do business.
- Let us know, in some instances we can get the sites taken down.
If you see a fake version of our site please let us know by sharing a screenshot, website, or the social media handle associated with it. With these details we can try to get the site blocked or taken down, and you'll be helping to protect other members of our community.
These are some examples of fake sites and ads: