Buyers Beware

Yes!  Look VERY carefully at the URL if you use a search engine to get to a store's site.  Yesterday my wife was re-ordering coffee from Stumptown - the site looked perfect - but she got an "invalid credit card" message, she thought it strange but tried another card - and got the same message.

Looking at the URL she then noticed that the was an extra e  - StumptowneCoffee in the URL.

So, two credit cards to lock and replace.

Almost all of our purchases are now made with Capital One Virtual cards - each vendor gets their own card number and that card number can be used only by that vendor.  Our Stumptown Coffee purchasing predates our use of virtual cards unfortunately.

Speaking with Stumptown they said they knew about this fake site and have been trying, without success, to stop the fake site from appearing in Google (etc.) search results.  To a large extent today the search keys are embedded in structured metadata in the pages so that it is trivial to get any site to appear as a result for a search.

I looked up StumptowneCoffee.com, in WhoIs and the deomain was registered on 12/02/2025!

It’s hard to make a purchase outside US.I did purchase amp from Canada from a guy who is legit Thomas Stereo.

This all Comes from data brokers who are getting your info from Sites that you have done business with before. They sell your info to the data brokers. Then the Data Brokers sell that to any one who wants to compile a list to send out spam and Bots and fraud and other reasons. There are over 600 and some Data Brokers who buy your info.

There is a Service that I use called Incogni. They go to the Data Brokers and request your name be removed. It is the law and they must compli. You can do it yourself but you would need a staff and a 40 hour work week to even scrape the bottom of the barrel to get to them all. They do it all for you as they monitor your name and when it pops up they go after the DB. Do a search and read up on this company. 

I use them and my spam has robo calls have been cut way down. You also get a report of how many were removed and how many are in progres of removal.

Mark R

Best practice: copy the website info and paste into ChatGPT and ask if it’s legit. 

Thanks for this useful information...

I wish to you and to all the best Christmas ever ... And Health....

Almost all of our purchases are now made with Capital One Virtual cards - each vendor gets their own card number and that card number can be used only by that vendor.