We recently received an Intel about a crowdfunding marketing agency called CrowdMar and decided to investigate. CrowdMar claims to be “a Leading Crowdfunding Marketing Agency created to solve the problem of campaign promotion.” The first red flag we noticed on their website was the absence of information about Staff or those who are running the organization. This is typical of scam websites, they either list fictitious individuals, or like in the case of CrowdMar, they don’t list at all.
The next thing we looked at was the customer testimonials on the website.
A quick reverse image search showed this image on numerous other websites
Meaning, this is a fictitious person, and obviously, the testimonial is fake. The next thing we looked at was the office address listed on the website.
A quick Google search showed this address belonged to a residential apartment complex.
Putting it together, we have a website that doesn’t list those who own or manage the business, uses fake reviews and a fake address. This has a scam written all over it.
Is crowdmar connected to other websites?
Looking at the source code we could not find any other connections. So we decided to use the address listed on the website to do a Google search, and we found several other shady websites using the same address.
Below are two websites homemademall.store and lubuxclusive.com that use the same address and even the same phone numbers.
We also found two more schemes using the same address. A pet shop called African grey parrots.
A quick peak at their Facebook page showed a reviewer calling it a scam.
The second was an apparel and clothing store called Trello Gifts.
The interesting thing about the Facebook page for this business is though it had our target address listed as its location, an admin of the page is located in Nigeria.
Our working theory was that it is the same entity that using the address “333 Fremont Street, San Francisco, California 94105” for all the websites and Facebook pages highlighted above but we could not find any other evidence to validate this theory except for the address they all share in common.
Finally, the lessons to be learned here is to be wary of websites that do not list owners or management teams with a link to their profiles, do not blindly trust the testimonials you see on a website, and always check to see if the company is located at the address listed on their website.