Found cheap heating oil online, but a liter never arrives? Consumer advocates are sounding the alarm: Bold fake shops are increasingly hidden behind professional-looking portals.
Empty tank, cold weather, prices fluctuate, and when looking for a cheap deal you quickly end up with providers you’ve never heard of. This is exactly where things get dangerous. The North Rhine-Westphalia consumer advice center is currently warning of a whole series of heating oil sites where payments are received but a liter of oil never arrives in the tank.
Be careful of fake shops: cheap heating oil often ends up empty
The scam is always the same: When looking for a cheap price per liter, the search engine leads to sites that advertise extremely low offers. At first glance everything seems serious. There is a logo, a clean homepage, and sometimes even quality seals or “customer reviews”. Visually, some fake shops hardly differ from established portals.
Only during the course of the order do the breaks become apparent: Suddenly only advance payment is required, supposedly because of “daily prices” or “market volatility”. There is no proper order confirmation or it only consists of a brief email without clear company details. Sometimes high delivery and additional costs arise subsequently that did not appear anywhere before. And as the delivery date gets closer, it keeps getting postponed. Until the provider finally stops responding at all.
What remains is an account movement into the void: the money has been transferred, the heating oil has never been seen, the “dealer” disappears behind an anonymous domain.
Heating oil fake shops: You should know these domains
In order to protect consumers, the North Rhine-Westphalia Consumer Center explicitly names five heating oil and fuel sites in its warning that, in its opinion, are pure rip-offs. Specifically, it’s about:
- fast-oil24.de
- fast-heizoel.de
- heiz-oel24.com
- heating oil-24.com
- simaholz.com
Considered critical according to t-online also, for example, the following domains:
- brennholzmeister.de
- brennstoffe-energy.de
- europellet.at
- easyoil.net
- e.holzheiz.com
- energieblitz24.de
- graenergie.com
- hackmann-heizoel.de
- heizoel-liefern.de
- heizoel-marke.de
- heizoel24.de
- heizoel-best.de
- heizoel-kalkulator.de
- heizoel-standard.de
- heating oil prices-region.de
- holzmarket24.com
- heizoel-freunde.de
- heizoelsicher.de
- hill-heizoel.de
- pellet-profi24.de
Why fake shops are so convincing
The fraudsters target exactly where many online buyers are particularly vulnerable: the price. Anyone who has to spend several hundred or even thousands of euros during the heating season often compares hard at the limit of the cheapest offer. If there is a name there that you don’t know, but the rest of the page seems “reputable”, it is tempting to access it anyway.
Fake shops exploit this behavior. They copy the structure and language of reputable trading portals, use similar color schemes, show symbols that look like seals of quality, and adorn themselves with reviews that are difficult to verify. The difference lies in the details and in a number of points that can be seen with a little attention.
How to recognize a dubious heating oil shop
When buying heating oil, you should not just look at the price per liter, but rather check the entire page as if it were an offer, which can cost several thousand euros. A few aspects are particularly revealing:
Imprint and company details
A reputable dealer has a complete imprint with name, legal form, address, contact options and – for German companies – often a VAT ID. If the imprint is completely missing or consists of fragmentary information, caution is advised. as t-online reported. A mailbox, an anonymous email address and no responsible person: That doesn’t suit a company that sells heating oil in large quantities.
Payment terms
Although advance payment is not unusual in energy trading, it should not be the only option. If a shop only accepts bank transfers in advance and does not offer any other payment methods, you should be suspicious, especially if you are working under time pressure (“only valid today”, “only with immediate payment”). Reputable providers are transparent and explain the payment methods in a comprehensible manner.
Price and appearance in comparison
A certain price difference between providers is normal. However, if a shop is significantly below everything that well-known portals display, but on the other hand provides hardly any comprehensible information about itself, this is a warning signal. Especially for goods in high demand such as heating oil or firewood, unrealistically low prices are a lure for dubious shops.
Domain and brand loyalty
Many fake shops choose names that look confusingly similar to reputable portals, for example through additions such as “24”, hyphens or other domain endings (“.com” instead of “.de”). If a name sounds familiar, it’s worth taking a look: Does the company actually exist, and is the domain you’re currently on the official one?
The fake shop finder: A quick check is worth it
Because it is hardly possible for individuals to keep track of all dubious providers, consumer advice centers have it Fake shop finder developed. It is specifically designed to check suspicious online shops, not just in the heating oil sector, for typical characteristics of dubious behavior.
It’s easy to use: you enter the web address of the shop you want to check and get an assessment of whether the site is unremarkable, conspicuous or probably fraudulent. The tool does not replace a full legal assessment, but is a very helpful early warning mechanism.
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