Scammer Dice Shops

^{Updated 22 Jan 2024}

Since late 2020 we’ve seen a significant amount of scammer shops pop up on Facebook and other social media. These accounts and stores advertise dice that aren’t theirs, and will not deliver what they promise.

How To Tell What’s A Scam

There are certain tells how you can spot whether an online store is a scam or not, and I would strongly advise not to buy from such sources. Below is a list of some of those tells:

• Low product costs^*: Incredibly low (“too good to be true”) prices for high end or unusual dice
• High shipping costs: Very high shipping costs, usually increasing, the more products you add to your cart
• Marketing ploys: Frequently used marketing ploys in ads such as “We are sad that we have to close our store, your last chance to buy at low price” or “We are giving away 200 dice sets” or “We’re clearing our warehouse” or “Free only today!”
• Glamour shots: Advertising unique dice sets with “glamour shot” type photos
• Inconsistent photography styles or quality because photos are stolen from different sources and not their own
• Strange names: Store or brand names that don’t make sense or sound odd, sometimes with extra random letters at the end (list of names below)
• Odd wording: English texts that sound awkward, like they were written by non-native speakers or automatically translated
• Emphasis on customer satisfaction: Texts that stress how special their dice are and that they cater to the individuality of customers with high quality product, sometimes odd wording for a dice store, e.g. “Our core vision is to help you express yourself”
• Uncustomised template text from a ready-made online store system, e.g. “This area is used to describe your product’s details. Tell customers about the look, feel, and style of your product.”
• Unprofessional looking e-mail addresses in the Contact Us section, e.g. margaretehomenickwrvht68@gmail.com
• Homepage setup: Often barebones online shop templates with simple dark text on white background without any graphic elements, often using a “Featured Collection” on the landing page, frequently use emojis in their navigation menus or product titles
• No physical location or address: There is no information anywhere on the website where the shop is actually located, who is running the shop or what country it operates from
• Shop or social media page creation date: The shop or the attached social media page was only created recently, usually within weeks or a few months of the ad being shown — should tell you right there that a store that has existed for only three months and is now doing a “closing down sale” is a bit fishy
• Fake reviews: Several similar comments under Facebook ad posts that are fake reviews (e.g. “I ordered these dice, and they are great quality,” or “I bought form this store and I received the product very fast.”)
• Hidden comments: Negative comments on the social media ads from people warning others of the scam will be deleted or hidden by the scammers, so that the number of visible comments is less than the total number of comments that the social media platform says were made on the post. (This will be hard to tell, once an ad has hundreds of comments.)

^* There are also scam shops that do the opposite and list dice with glamorous photos that are overpriced at 30-50% average retail price. These shops usually have a very barebones website with only the products and very generic legal disclaimers, shipping information and an anonymous contact form.

See also my “10 Questions You Should Ask to Avoid Dice Scams” post on Reddit.

How These Scams Work

Scam shops usually entice customers with cool or unique looking dice that will garner the customer’s attention, paired with a catchy marketing slogan that will make the ad seem like it’s a deal you don’t wanna miss out on. Some of the commonly used themes for this are listed in the table below.

When you order from a scam shop, one of the following things is likely happen:

1. You order, pay and then never hear from the store again and will never receive what you ordered. When you contact them, they will ghost you and not respond, or perhaps by the time you want to reach out, their website doesn’t even exist anymore.
2. You order, pay and never receive your product. When you contact the scammer and ask for shipment information, they will either say they don’t have a tracking number or provide a tracking number that exists as such but is a shipment sent to someone else and not your order. This makes it hard to get a chargeback from the payment provider you used because the scammer will claim they have proof that they sent out your order.
3. You order, pay and receive a product that is inferior in quality to what you thought you were buying. These types of scams are also called “bait & switch scam”. This could be having ordered a high end looking set of semi-precious stone dice but being sent a set of cheaply produced acrylic dice instead. When you send a complaint to the scammer, they will either ghost you or ask you to send the dice back to China before they will offer you a refund. When you take this to your bank or your payment provider, they may refuse to do a chargeback since the scam shop offered you an option for a refund.

Commonly Used Scamming Themes

The following themes and patterns have been observed for dice scam shops in the past few years:

Example Ads

Scam Store Names

These stores advertise under different names, and they’re often some kind of strange or nonsensical fantasy name or a first name with the word “dice” or “dragon” or “dnd” added (e.g. Jackiednd, Donniedice). Store names so far seen include the following:

* via Amazon – not technically a scam store but massively overprices their dice

One of the stores that often comes up in connection with cheap dice is named Dice Legend. While they do send out actual product, I recommend you do not buy there. They use stolen photos of dice they don’t actually carry (which are often exclusive to handmakers or other stores) and will send you cheap rip-offs.

What you can do

If you got scammed by one of these stores, the only thing you can do is try to get a chargeback from your bank or the payment service you used. It may not always be possible to actually get your money back, though.

In terms of trying to fight these scammers, unfortunately there is very little that consumers can do about all this since the scammers are located in China and there’s legally not a lot that can be done from outside of China.

Whenever you see such an ad or post on Facebook, Instagram or other social media, you’re encouraged to report it as a scam. There may be other ways to report fake shops as well, for instance if they use URL shorteners like bit.ly that have spam reporting forms.

You can also leave comments on the ads to try and warn other consumers, but these comments are usually very quickly either deleted or hidden by the scammers running the ads.

Last but not least, you can spread the word. Let the people you know who have an interest in dice know that these scam shops are out there and tell them how to recognise the signs they may be falling for a scam or share warnings or links to this blog post on social media.

What Others Are Saying

Mike Saltzman from Viridian Dice has made a YouTube video explaining these kinds of scams as well. Interestingly, he explains that even if you use PayPal for these stores and you get scammed by being sent a vastly inferior item, PayPal may not necessarily refund you, they will encourage you to work it out with the seller for a return and refund. And since the seller is only there to scam people, they will make it incredibly difficult to get a refund, which is why most customers then don’t bother going that route.

Dark Elf Dice Scam Shop

Some time in 2022, a Chinese scammer started imitating the well known and legitimate dice shop Dark Elf Dice by making a shop website that looked very similar to the real Dark Elf Dice but had a different URL. This scam shop now seems to have finally have gone away, but I’ll leave the information here to read up on the history, because scammers are becoming a real problem these days.

The real Dark Elf Dice shop has the URL darkelfdice.com, the scam shop went by darkelfshop.com. On the surface, the scam shop seemed legitimate, but if you looked a little more closely, you could see that the fake shop showed clear signs of not being a valid dice store. For instance, the “About Us” section sounded very strange for a dice shop since it talked about women’s fashion, and it called themselves “Cheap Dark Elf Dice Store”.

ABOUT US
Cheap Dark Elf Dice Store is the ultimate style destination for feel-good fashion to make every woman look good & feel great! With all the latest trends, wardrobe essentials & accessories, plus style tips, body shape & outfitting advice –Cheap Dark Elf Dice Store is the one stop shop for flattering, fashionable & affordable style solutions.

You can always rely on Cheap Dark Elf Dice Store to make you look fabulous!

There’s now a new Dark Elf Dice impersonator shop at the URL darkelfdicetop.shop.

Before you buy from Dark Elf Dice, always make sure that you’ve got the shop with the darkelfdice.com URL before you purchase anything!

Kickstarter Scam Warning

There have been a number of dice Kickstarters in the past that turned out to be scams. In a post in Dice Maniacs’ Club, a DMC member kindly shared that these Kickstarters often follow the same pattern (info from 2021):

• Creator: Someone working for a company from Hong Kong or Singapore, usually first creator but has backed a few projects, Kickstarter profile is private and you can’t see the backed projects, has no Facebook page at all or a very recent one, very little to no information about the company available online
• Currency: Always Hong Kong dollars
• Reward: Always a 7-die RPG set
• Video: Always good quality video with music, no people in the video, usually a spinning camera or light effect and a black background
• Pictures: Very similar style, with the company logo watermarked on it (usually in the corner)
• Communication style: The texts all have the same style of phrasing and wording, often uses “I” instead of “we”, often starting with a story about how the unique idea for the dice was conceived as a collaborative effort
• Delivery time: usually 2-3 months after end of the campaign
• Timing: Next scam campaign is usually launched roughly 2 weeks after the previous one reached its goal (about the time the creator receives the funds)
• Outcome: Roughly 2 weeks after the project gets funded, communication from the creator stops, around the time the funds have been received, with many comments from backers afterwards on Kickstarter who never received their reward