The following analysis shows the transaction with a fraudulent web shop – in this case pompmex.com – and what was necessary to take it down.
Placing the order is easy: just some mouse clicks and providing some information. In minutes the money is gone. Fighting to get the money back takes some time and energy. As many people fall victim to fraudulent web shops every day, the analysis should give these people an idea of which steps are necessary to fight back and how many days this typically takes. There is little to no special knowledge required to fight for the spent money, but a certain amount of technical understanding to take the site down.
Before the buyer placed the order, he checked various online scam trackers. Not a single one reported a problem with pompmex.com. Following are just two examples:
and
As we will see later, even Trustpilot’s statements cannot be trusted blindly. So, rule number one is, never trust the various scam trackers. If in doubt, send an email to the provided address or – even better – call the store.
The buyer placed the order on 10/04/2025 and immediately noticed something is fishy when PayPal informed him of the financial transaction going to Mexico:
The name „Ximena Aguilar Flores“ could not be associated with the web shop. Also, the web shop did not provide any information pointing to Mexico. The address provided by Pompmex is a pizza place in New Jersey:
It is highly unlikely that this place sells pizzas and running shoes at the same time.
After the notification from PayPal, the following unfolds:
The buyer noticed that the provided email address bounces and the phone number belongs to another business. Now it is clear that we are dealing with a fake web shop. Even the two provided USPS tracking numbers are fake in the sense that they are old, reused numbers from completely different parties.
PayPal does not stop such transactions in short time even when reported. So when the transaction showed up some days later on the buyer’s bank statement, it described the seller (the merchant) as a person in the Heating, Plumbing, and AC business:
Note that 402-935-7733 is not the merchants phone number but the customer service number of PayPal.
Note also that the original order was for US$ 99.98 including shipping and taxes. Suddenly the charge got increased to US$ 114.97, a more than 10% increase. I could not explain this increase with PayPal’s fees.
Especially evil is that the buyer’s PayPal account got blocked twice. I have not found out if this was triggered by the seller or by PayPal itself. But it is a sure way to increase the blood pressure when a desperate victim tries to resolve a financial transaction. PayPal gives close to no information why the account got blocked and there is a waiting period before the account can be unblocked. Other than with Aunt Bertha’s old general store at the corner, you cannot simply pick up the phone and call companies like PayPal to resolve an issue.
But the story continues and it takes until 11/10/2025 to finally close the case to the advantage of the buyer. This is more than a month after the buyer made the purchase:
Taking down the web shop took some effort. The registrar of the domain pompmex.com, a company called Gname, sent multiple automated emails stating that if no snapshots as evidence for the fraudulent activity are provided, the case will be closed. In at least one email it was said the case had been closed. Fact is, with the first report and later in the process, various snapshots were provided. Apparently, these were all ignored by Gname. Only after complaining to ICANN, the central coordinator of name spaces and domains, Gname suddenly complied and disabled the domain pompmex.com. Nobody knows how many people fell victim to this web shop in the meantime.
In retrospective, reporting the financial transaction as fraudulent to PayPal and the buyer’s bank was easy. The bank process has to be started online, which was possible both through the bank’s mobile app and the web portal. The friendly counter clerk at the bank was not able to help. The victim has to calculate in a certain amount of waiting time before such disputes are resolved either way. In the meantime, there is no active communication on the status. Once the case had been opened, it was not possible to provide (additional) evidence.
According to the FTC, it received fraud reports from 2.6 million consumers in 2024, nearly the same amount as 2023. Online shopping issues were the second most commonly reported in the fraud category. In my mind it is important to fight back if someone fell victim to an online shopping fraud. It is not only about the lost money but also about stopping a criminal business that is racking in millions of dollars every year.