Website Name
Sport Central (SportECentral.com)
Website Type
Appliances & Electronics Store
Is Sport Central Fake or Real?
Fake
Why is Sport Central Fake?
SportECentral.com is the website of Sport Central, an ecommerce company that claims to sell appliances and electronics. Sport Central’s prices are roughly 50% less than the prices found on other websites.
As soon as I opened the home page, several things struck me as odd. Going by the name, I obviously assumed that they sell sports-related goods. This is not the case at all as they sell a random assortment of products like blenders, smartwatches and car speakers. The page title is ‘Sport Central – Budget ideas for your’ and the logo shows a wrench and a magnifying glass.
A domain name lookup of the website shows that it was created on 16th April 2020. There is no information about the registrant’s name and location as it has been protected for privacy.
The website is really shoddy. There is no original content anywhere and the design template seems to be lifted too. None of the categories present in the Shop drop-down have any products at all.
The prices of the products on Sport Central are almost half of the originals.
There are some contact details mentioned, but they don’t check out. There is an address provided of Maud, Oklahoma which seems to be a residence and not a business. Meanwhile, the phone number given is shown by TrueCaller to be operating from Milwaukee, though 503 seems to be the telephone code for Oregon.
There are social media icons given on the website but they are just dummies. Sport Central doesn’t have any social media presence. The few reviews available for Sport Central are overwhelmingly negative. The customer reviews on SabiReviews and OnlineThreatAlerts warn that the website is a front for phishing card details of customers. People who have placed orders on Sport Central did not receive any order confirmation. A few days after placing the order, they started witnessing unauthorized transactions using their cards.
It seems plain and clear that Sport Central is a scam. Their modus operandi is to run Google ads claiming to sell the products at unbelievable prices. The card details provided by buyers are then used to carry out illegal transactions.
Sport Central has nothing to do with sport, the website is of extremely poor quality and the prices are obviously fake. The address and phone number don’t belong to them either. Shopping on the site exposes users to the risk of giving their bank and card details to scammers. It is advisable to avoid Sport Central at all costs.
If you see any Google ads by Sport Central, do everyone a favour by reporting the ad using this form.
How to Get Your Money Back from a Scam
Remember: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
If you have been the victim of an ecommerce scam, you can take the following steps:
- Lodge a complaint at the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal
- File a complaint with the payment portal and ask whether the payment can be reversed.
- File a complaint with the Consumer Complaints Forum
- Leave a negative review on review portals such as Scamadviser, TrustPilot and OnlineThreatAlerts
- Report the website to Google using the Suspicious Site Reporter extension for Chrome
- Give a low rating to the website on Web of Trust. You can also install their extension for the same.
Disclaimer: This review is intended for information only and should not be relied on when making financial or business decisions. If you are a website owner and would like to provide clarifications regarding your business and/or website, please get in touch using the Contact Form.