Scam Marine webstore?

[Mexican Hat]

Looking for a specific windlass. Found one at www.marinedeal.com and placed an order. They were cheaper than everyone else but not by enough to raise a red flag. A few minutes later I received an email telling me they couldn't ship it to a different State (I'm currently in the USA) because of the credit card rules. They asked me to use PayPal. Hmmmm. Funny smell #1. Their English was not great either though that's not uncommon. But bad enough to make it FS #2.

We emailed back and forth a couple of times. The tone of the exchanges was a bit off too. FS #3, but still nothing really clear, just a suspicion. I contacted my card company to see if a different shipping address had suddenly become a problem with them. Nope, no new regulations on their part and I told Marinedeal this. They replied that they will cancel the order unless I use PayPal...

So while I cannot say with certainty that www.MarineDeal is a fake website aimed at stealing from the boating community, it appears that way to me. It's suspicious enough that I would not try to buy anything from them. Incidentally in the same search I came across a different marine site, lost in my deleted history, that appeared to have an identical website layout though with slightly different prices.

I would do my civic duty and report it to the proper authorities but past experiences made me realize that reporting suspected internet fraud is just a frustrating and utterly pointless waste of one's time, at least in the USA.

Buyer beware, someone put a lot of effort into setting this up and who knows how many more of these there are.

[Simi 60]

I had a look at the site
https://www.marinedeal.com/category_s/14.htm
I think you worry to much.
Use paypal

[Oeanda]

FWIW, I agree that the English language on their site is a bit ‘off’. Not usually a good sign for a company supposedly located in NA, regardless of anything else.

[sailingunity]

They have a Facebook page with 24 friends.

The website is very "flat", e.g. return policy and everything is on the home page.

The category pages, for example Electrical > Battery chargers has what looks like copy and pasted "tutorials" that runs for miles at the bottom of the page, no doubt to get SEO to like them.

Would trip my funny smell meter too.