Well it seems that the scammers still have ghd firmly in their sights, as last time we checked, Google’s paid-for listings (the bits at the top and down the far right side) was mostly made up of scam websites offering stupidly large "discounts" off of completely worthless and potentially very dangerous fake ghds.
One of the latest scams is claiming that the "incredible" prices are due to the straighteners being VAT free. Well here is an interesting point: in the UK the VAT threshold is £67,000 per year, which only equates to selling 670 ghd stylers per year (or less than TWO per day)… So if a website is claiming that they can offer you a VAT free price, what they are actually saying is that on average they sell less than two ghds per day (nevermind anything else). Which would suggest that they are at best, a very small operation (given that some of the larger ghd websites sell hundreds, if not thousands, of ghds per day!)
Of course they could say that the reason they don’t charge VAT is because they are based "overseas". Which is about as big a red flag as you could possibly have waved in your face. The only overseas sites that could legally supply you are based in the European Union (and a few other places like Norway and Switzerland), and last time we checked the way the pound is in the exchange rates, the only bargains to be had are by customers in Europe shopping on UK sites. Which means that the "overseas" site is likely to be based considerably further afield – like China or Hong Kong. And trust us when we tell you that ghd (a British brand) do not supply websites in the Far East at crazy knockdown prices so that they can then resell into the British market undercutting all UK websites (including ghd’s own site).
The fact remains that ghd hair straighteners are expensive to buy not only for you, but for the merchant that is selling them to you. An approved ghd website is lucky to be making 20-25% markup on them, so why (oh why) would they be offering them to you at up to 50% off??
Stay safe, and avoid fake ghds by shopping via our ghd price comparison tables.
One final thing though, as the Evening Gazette (a newspaper covering Teesside, Middlesbrough and the North East) reported recently, the UK Border Agency officers recently seized a shipment of counterfeitghd hair straighteners, which would have been worth £320,000. These would have been headed to car boot sales, non-ghd approved salons and other rogue traders, so watch out online or offline and make sure you only buy genuine ghd hair straightners.
{ 1 comment }
[fake site name removed]
I fear that this Website is counterfit.
I could kick myself, I bought my partner a pair last year from ghdhair.com which are fantastic, however I was stupidly drawn to the the £55.00 price tag advertised by a very genuine looking site called [fake site name removed]
I only have two contact email addressed for this site a “customer services” email address and a hotmail account from the paypal receipt both of which are not responding to my emails for a refund.
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