What 2,000 checked online stores have in common: scam shop data (2026)

HasTrust has now assessed 2,061 online stores that a shopper doubted enough to paste into the checker. Every store got a trust score and a label, and for most we recorded the domain's registration date, its top-level domain, its hosting country and its registrar. This post is what those records say, in plain numbers. It is a corpus, not a market survey: shops get checked because someone was already suspicious, so the share of bad shops here is higher than on the open web. The patterns inside the corpus are the useful part.

The corpus

• 1,467 stores rated Trusted (average score 90 out of 100).
• 274 rated Mixed (average 62).
• 120 rated Caution (average 38).
• 200 rated High risk (average 6).

Roughly one in ten doubted stores turned out to be an outright scam, and another one in six had enough problems to warrant a warning. Nearly three quarters were fine, which is worth remembering: doubt is cheap, and most of the time the shop passes.

Domain age is the signal that separates them

We know the registration date for 1,741 of these domains. The median high-risk store's domain was 254 days old on the day it was checked. The median trusted store's domain was 9,707 days old, which is more than 26 years. The two groups barely overlap.

• 57% of high-risk stores ran on a domain under one year old; 29% on a domain under 90 days old.
• 1% of trusted stores ran on a domain under one year old.

Turned around, the age of the domain alone predicts the verdict:

• Domain younger than 90 days: 91% high risk (57 stores).
• 90 days to 1 year: 70% high risk (81 stores).
• 1 to 3 years: 64% high risk (53 stores).
• 3 years or older: 8% high risk, 78% trusted (1,550 stores).

The practical rule for a shopper: an unfamiliar store on a domain registered this year is guilty until it proves otherwise, and "this year" is the first thing to check. The registration date is public in any WHOIS lookup, and HasTrust shows it on every verdict.

New domain endings carry most of the risk

Among endings with at least 15 stores in the corpus, .shop stands out: 95% of the 21 .shop stores were high risk. The classic endings behave differently: .com stores were high risk 13% of the time (1,771 stores), and none of the .uk (22) or .ca (15) stores were. The country endings of the Netherlands, France and Germany sat in between, at 21% to 30%, but with small counts.

The reason is price and friction. A .shop domain costs a few dollars, needs no paperwork, and is exactly what someone renting a domain for six weeks picks. A .co.uk or .ca domain is not harder to get, but scam operators evidently do not bother.

Where scam shops are hosted, and who registered them

Hosting country tells you where the servers are, not where the operator is. With that caveat: of the 170 stores we could place in the United States, 65% were high risk; Canada, 59% of 74; Germany, 76% of 21. Cheap cloud capacity in those countries is what a fake shop rents. A US IP address is not a sign of a US business.

Registrar data is thinner, because we only record it for stores that needed the deeper check. Within that set, stores registered through NameCheap were high risk 86% of the time (22 stores), Tucows 87% (15) and GoDaddy 65% (37). These registrars serve millions of legitimate sites; the number says which counters scam operators walk up to, not that the registrar is at fault.

Red flags stack

A verdict lists concrete red flags: no company details, a domain younger than the shop claims to be, payment methods that cannot be reversed, lookalike branding, reviews that cluster. High-risk stores carried 3.3 flags on average and only 3% had none. Trusted stores averaged 1.3, and 24% had none at all. A single flag is normal even for a good shop. Three or more, on a young domain, is the profile of a store that will not ship.

What people are checking now

The corpus was seeded in June 2026 with well-known retailers, which is why that month shows 1,696 checks and a 6% high-risk rate. Since then the checker has been driven by real doubt: in August 2026, 68% of the 240 stores people checked were high risk, and September is running at 60%. When a shopper feels the need to check, they are usually right to.

What this means before you buy

1. Look up the domain's registration date first. Under a year old, on a store you have never heard of, is the strongest single warning in this data.
2. Treat a .shop, .top or .xyz ending on a branded-goods store as a second warning.
3. Count the flags. One is noise; three is a pattern.
4. Pay in a way you can reverse. A card or PayPal dispute is the only recourse most of the stores above ever offered.

You can paste any store into the scam checker and see the same signals for that shop, with sources. The methodology behind the score is on how we score, and the live figures on the statistics page update every six hours. The numbers in this post were computed on 2 September 2026 and may be reused with attribution (CC-BY 4.0).