Voguelande

Voguelande.com complete fraud - I was researching a Channel bag online and came across Voguelande's website. They had the bag I was looking for at a lower then expected price. However, it wasn't cheap at almost $700.00.So, I e-mailed them to ask if it was authentic. They guaranteed it was, so stupidly I ordered it without researching the website. After four weeks of not receiving the bag, I tried to cancel the order. They wouldn't and sent the bag almost seven weeks after I placed the order and the credit card was charged. The bag is a complete fake and they will not accept returns or admitt that it is a fake. STAY AWAY FROM THEM! I'm out $700., you don't have to be.

I love my Louis Vuitton Mahina bag purchased from voguelande.com.

Hopfully I can receive another one shortly.

It only takes a few minutes to see enough here to alert someone to a potentially fraudulent business. And given that there are endless outlets to choose from on the web, going for one that smells even a little doubtful is a bad choice. But if you don't know how to tell or where to look, it will trick you.

Designer handbags are amongst the most widely faked items on the web, perhaps *the* most frequently and outrageously faked, with little attempt sometimes being made to conceal the fact.

Because thousands and thousands of people were being taken for a ride by handbag fakers at venues such as Ebay, eventually word got around and people started to be a lot more cautious. The most obvious giveaway of course was the prices - nobody sells a Balenciaga bag at less than trade price, nobody. And eventually the market caught on to that obvious-in-hindsight reality.

So traders came up with a simple and ironic solution - yes, you guessed it, they continued to sell the same stuff, and they simply put their prices way up, so that people were no longer sure whether items were genuine or not. And that's what's happening here, cheap goods being traded for a much higher percentage than, for example, fake laptops or fake shoes. The handbag business is, I think, unique in having succeeded in getting people to pay almost retail prices for junk.

But you don't have to be caught, nobody has to be caught. Yet people willingly hand over hundreds of dollars on the assurances of a company (probably just one person working out of an apartment) that they've never heard of and which has a fake address and an untraceable telephone number, too, likely as not.

There is a simple way to avoid this trap. If you want a Balencia bag, and you see one for sale on a website, send an email to Balenciaga and ask them if the dealer is genuine (it isn't, because Balenciaga only has one dealer and this isn't it, but let's pretend we don't know that).

Every brand belongs to some company somewhere, however fancy and however far away across the world it might be. And every company has a Customer Service department, which absolutely does not want you buying a crappy fake bag and believing it's the real thing. Send them an email.

If you can't find an email address on the company's main retail website, although that's unlikely, you can try sending one to either info@ whatever the company is, or customerservice@ or sales@ or support@ the company or something similar. One of them is bound to work. But generally any reputable company will make sure their potential customers can contact them easily, especially if those potential customers are about to blow a couple of thousand bucks on a handbag. Just give them the address of the website you're planning on handing money to, and ask them outright if the products there are authentic or not.

It's as simple as that. Yet how many people think of doing it? Perhaps, they don't like to admit to Dior or Chanel that they're thinking of buying a bag from the doubtful, only-been-there-a-week website that's offering the "authentic" products for 30% off. They'd look like cheapskates, right? But they don't understand that Dior and Chanel don't want people walking around with counterfeit bags and will do whatever they can to prevent it. It's bad for business, bad for their profits and bad for the brand when these allegedly-genuine bags fall to bits. If a site is selling fakes, they'll tell you for sure. And normally I think you'll find they'll tell you if there are authorized online dealers and who they are, so that you'll know that everyone else is phony.

If in doubt, go to the source and don't take risks. Easy.