bigsop.com : Beware of Contests

bigsop.com suddenly came to our focus because of complains by two regular visitors. Our findings reveals that it is better to beware of contests part. The name, to some extent is kind of uncanny, it is normal to perform a typographical error towards – bigshop. Possibly this business chain runs in few countries, that includes India and other few countries. As per various online website shows – their direct buying is probably ‘fair’ but the most uncanny part is bigsop.com contests.

 

bigsop.com Contests : What is the Deal?

 

This type of kind of online fraud is nothing new, but unfortunately bigsop.com contests has pop up (read landing pages), which are quite genuine looking, highly targeted and optimized landing pages from fully unexpected  good quality websites, makes even quite alert online users to become their customers – customers? Yes, their business model is interesting (pun intended) and legally its difficult to proof that bigsop.com contests are fraud. Our regular regular readers describes one such pop up from StumbleUpon (what?) as there were only three tabs opened on the browser and another visitor can not properly recall the ‘origin’. As unfortunately none takes video screen casts while going through these kind of deals, the description is fully memory based :

 

1. Visitor 1 : One Pop-Up came during surfing a reliable website for being ‘selected’ for being selected for a contest based on IP. The landing was quite deceptive to ultimately pay ~ $10 USD to participate the contest. Unfortunately, really deals, offers exist for almost free giveaway by the bigger brands in real life for high value customers. This visitor was trapped in an unusual way.
2. Visitor 2 : This case was easy to guess the possible cheat – the landing page was faked like to be of Facebook UI.

 

bigsop.com Contests : What We Found

 

To be very honest, it is not possible for us to get all the details about bigsop.com. But, as their business is mainly online, it appears that, they primarily convert the participation money to their Points – recall what we wrote in Lock in Effect in Todays Technology and Gadgets. However, the WHOIS details shows  the domain is owned by Scube Solutions is the registrant company and Mr. Surendra Gupta is the registrant. The company named Scube Solutions has a LinkedIn profile :

 

 

It is difficult to say whether the submitted data are real. The Domain and Server is from GoDaddy and Amazon, respectively. On the same node of Amazon, another domain resides :

 

 

Full server WHOIS :

scamadviser.com gives a Trust Score of 10%, the nicest written article is here :

As the owners, as thought has good idea on SEO, web marketing, it was quite easy for them to go for such a setup. Oddly, unlike real business actually they have no local search listing on Google Local Business. We can not officially state about their other “products”, but the “contest” part must be avoided.