At first glance, Vogue Melbourne looks every inch an upmarket Australian boutique.

The website features photos of models in fashionable clothes and slogans like "Be You Be Beautiful".

It boasts 100,000 satisfied customers, an extensive catalogue of items and claims to accept a range of reputable payment options.

Look a little closer though and things aren't quite what they seem.

You might have noticed that the site is advertising a Halloween sale with up to 50 per cent discounts.

Halloween came and went at the end of October, but that sale has continued.

Since ABC NEWS Verify started monitoring this site in early October, there has always been an up to 50 per cent discount advertised. Back then, it was called a "winter sale".

Let's look closer at one product: this dress.

It looks like a professionally taken photograph of a stylish garment. The site even gives it a "trademarked" name "Annaliese".

The photos appear to have come from London fashion brand House of CB.

The garment is the Lolita Apricot Corset Sundress, for sale with House of CB for $322 (currently on sale for $261).

We also found the same photographs advertising the dress on Chinese shopping website AliExpress for as little as $19.09. So either Vogue Melbourne is getting a sweet deal on a designer fashion item, or it is shipping a cheap knock off.

As the name — and this sandwich board — suggest, Vogue Melbourne claims to have a physical presence in Victoria's capital. It even lists a physical address on the home page, placing it inside Melbourne's upmarket Emporium shopping centre.

But this image has been generated from a custom stock image company.

And it's unlikely that a Sydney store will be opening anytime soon when there's no record of the Melbourne store inside the Emporium mall.

Then there are the reviews. The site appears to be displaying an authentic Trustpilot review system, a legitimate website which allows customers to provide public feedback about businesses.

Vogue Melbourne claims its Trustpilot rating is excellent — but again, it's a fake.

The actual rating according to the real Trustpilot site? Bad.

But surely it's not all negative, right?

At least Vogue Melbourne offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee?

Well, the site's real Trustpilot page is full of stories of that promise not being kept by the store.

Vogue Melbourne presents itself as a high-end, Australian fashion retailer. But as you can see, it is anything but.

ABC NEWS Verify has discovered many more sites just like it, all convincing Australians to part with their money, sometimes for an inferior product and sometimes for no product at all …

How social media is giving scammers the tools they need to trick Australians into parting with their money.

Vogue Melbourne is one of more than 50 shopping websites ABC NEWS Verify has tracked over several months that appear to be falsely representing themselves online as high-end Australian retailers.

Almost exclusively run from overseas, the websites are mass-produced digital stores sometimes selling cheap and often poor-quality products imported directly from Asia.

They have a strong and seemingly unchecked presence on Meta's social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Despite having names like Sydney Stylista, Beaumont Gold Coast and Perth Apparel, Facebook transparency information often shows these pages have several administrators outside of Australia.

Nonetheless, social media giant Meta allows these pages to run ads on its platforms that target Australians and funnel them to their websites.

Many of the ads use similar language, and sometimes the same images that tug at the heart strings of shoppers, with talk of closing down sales, and shop fires.

While there's nothing illegal about shipping goods in from another country, customers are being tricked into thinking they are shopping locally. They're left with little practical recourse for international returns or exchanges, and often hundreds of dollars out of pocket.

Meta didn't respond directly to detailed questions from ABC NEWS Verify by time of publication, but confirmed they are looking into the flagged pages.

"We are investigating this matter. Meta doesn't want scams on our platforms, and we are continuing to invest in tools and technology to prevent them. The safety of our users is of utmost importance, and we continue to work with industry, the government and law enforcement to protect Australians from scams."

Deception in action

The 57 online stores ABC NEWS Verify has tracked are managed and run by different people and groups but have a very similar look online.

The websites appear to have been designed and created using common templates on the e-commerce platform Shopify. They then advertise heavily on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

The products they sell are mostly mass-produced fast-fashion items, commonly produced in Asia.

The sites all use a legal supply chain model called dropshipping. The product you receive has often been shipped from an entirely different country, without any direct handling from the seller.

Normally, when you make a purchase on a website …

… it's the retailer who ships the product directly to you.

But with dropshipping, the retailer places an order with a supplier, who could be located in a completely different country.

That supplier then ships the item directly to you, without the involvement of the retailer who you placed the order with.

So what happens when you want to make a return or exchange? Some of these dropshipping websites offer them for "free".

But you can't just return your item to the online store that you bought from.

Buried in the returns policy fine print of many of the stores we investigated, was a clause which states returns are shipped back to a central warehouse in Asia. That's the original supplier.

And while the buyer could possibly get their money back …

… what they're often surprised to learn, often buried in the fine print, is that they have to foot the international shipping bill to send the item back to the supplier.

This can sometimes be close to or equal the amount paid for the item in the first place.

This is difficult for consumer regulators to police, as while dropshipping is a perfectly legal business model, where this scam begins is the misleading tactics being used to deceive shoppers into thinking they've been dealing with a local business.

This can leave customers feeling misled, dissatisfied and out-of-pocket.

Rosie Thomas, the director of campaigns at consumer watchdog Choice told ABC NEWS Verify that after thinking you've been dealing with an Australian business, the idea that you would have to pay to ship the item back overseas to return it often comes as "quite a shock".

"Even if you return the item, if you don't get the refund, or you don't get the response that you would like, there are limited options in the digital environment as to where you can take your complaint."

Catriona Lowe, the deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission told ABC NEWS Verify that all customers shopping online in Australia — even with international operators — have rights.

"If consumers do feel that they've been misled by this conduct, we encourage them to get in contact either with our info centre or with their state and territory fair trading agencies."

'Shocked to the socks'

Retired music teacher Julie (not her real name) was excited when she spotted a colourful knitted jumper advertised for sale on Instagram by the now-defunct online store Aussie Hilda.

At $84 the jumper wasn't an insignificant purchase for the aged pensioner, but she reasoned that its 'original price', at $250, was listed far higher and that she may have stumbled onto a bargain.

"Very naively, my mind thought that it was a good quality item and it had been reduced. I thought it was coming from Australia. And I thought if there's any problem with it, I'll be able to just send it back to Australia, probably to Melbourne," she said.

What arrived in the post several weeks later was far from the high-quality warm jumper she was expecting. Instead it was a low-quality polyester fabric with the pattern of a knit printed onto it.

"Thin plastic-y fabric has been used to make the jumper and then something is stamped onto it at the front and the back."

The ACCC's Catriona Lowe says it appears Julie has the right to lodge a formal complaint.

"It is incredibly important that the business is not misleading consumers about the nature of their business, about what they might expect in terms of delivery times and of course, that what they are purchasing, or what they can see online, matches what they ultimately are delivered."

A second shock came when Julie tried to return the item and arrange a refund.

"They said I'd have to send it back to some address in China somewhere, and that I would have to pay the postage to which I said to them, 'well, it's going to cost me almost the same amount in postage as it cost me for the actual item'," Julie said.

Julie is one of more than 40 disgruntled customers of these websites that ABC NEWS Verify has spoken to as part of this investigation. She eventually managed to obtain a refund through PayPal after weeks of frustrating back and forth with Aussie Hilda administrators, who appear to be located in Indonesia.

Extraordinarily, when the 73-year-old Sydneysider reported the page to Instagram's parent company Meta for its deceptive behaviour, she says her account was temporarily blocked, while Aussie Hilda's page remained active and advertising for many more weeks.

Choice's Ms Thomas says Meta needs to do much more.

"We think, at a minimum, Meta should be verifying the identities of the businesses that it's taking money from to advertise on their platforms.

"This would ensure that those businesses are who they say they are. And in the case of scams, should pick up whether or not it is an impersonation and and there's a significant risk for consumers."

Fake fashion

One of the most common deceptions we've seen the 57 tracked websites use is fake product reviews.

In addition to the fake Trustpilot reviews highlighted earlier, many of these sites also display fake unbranded testimonials often using stock or AI generated images.

The familiar names on these reviews below, for example, give away the game. The names do not even match the supplied photographs.

These fake reviews often have wording that no human would ever actually use. Using dated Australian slang like "cobber" and describing delivery as "quick as a rat up a drainpipe", they appear to be crafted to seem authentic to Australians but are anything but.

The lies and AI carry over to many of the ads we see plastered across Meta's social media platforms — with claims of shops closing down, burning down and using artificially generated store owners.

We've also tracked shops stealing or altering photos of real Australian shopfronts.

Legitimate Melbourne store Kloke had no idea a photo of its very real store was being used by Wilson Melbourne on its Facebook page, until contacted by ABC NEWS Verify.

Fake Sydney outlet TrendyOz is actually a badly photoshopped photo of a Calvin Klein store in Sydney's CBD Westfield.

One site, various countries

Online store Vogue Melbourne claims to be run by Garry Williams, an Australian physiotherapist and Cècile Laurent, a "talented" French fashion designer.

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