The deals of America is a discount gift certificate website that offers discounted gift cards to various stores across the nation, such as Amazon, Kohl’s, Target, and many others. The store sells fixed value coupon e-codes for various retail outlets that can be redeemed during the checkout process at their respective websites. These coupons or “e-gift cards” as they call them, never expire and can be redeemed at any time.
Is Deals of America Legit?
The website claims to sell the gift codes for a certain fixed price, while in reality it sells them way below their face value and pockets the difference for themselves. For example: if you want to buy a $100 Amazon e-gift card from their website, they’ll sell it to you for only $90. That’s a 10% discount on Amazon gift cards which is quite substantial. However this is not the end of it, here is where their scheme gets interesting! With each gift card purchase made on deals of America, they offer “instant” discounts in terms of target gift cards (e.g $50 Target gift card for $45). Please note these are e-code gift cards and not physical gift cards that you get in hand, they are sent to your email address. It’s like getting free money basically!
Also, take note that the “instant discount” is not applied until checkout! For example, you can buy a $90 e-gift card for $90, then apply the discount code that pops up during checkout and you’d be paying only $63. That’s an instant 33% off although it appears to be not so once you are redirected to the payment page again.
This is how they make their money…
Here’s another interesting thing, if you want to buy multiple gift cards (especially Target and Walmart), the website will offer discounts only during checkout. They send a separate email for each purchase and make it seem like you are getting “additional” discounts although they don’t actually discount anything until checkout. Pretty sneaky right? You might think these guys are legit by the way they have presented things… but read on to find out how this website works.
1) Not really a gift card website
First of all, the domain name that deals of America is using www.dealsofamerica.com which ONLY belongs to them, nothing else! If you go to Google and type in “deals of America” you’ll see multiple other legit sites with the same name. This is not one of them! So please be careful when shopping because it’s NOT really deals of America that you are visiting, it’s something entirely different/fraudulent!
2) Do not buy any products listed on the website
You might be wondering why you are unable to buy any of the products listed on their website. This is because they don’t sell anything that’s really physical, it’s just coupons or e-codes instead! You cannot physically “own” these items just by buying them from here. No matter how cheap the price is, DO NOT BUY anything from deals of America! You will not be able to get it shipped to you, so this is a complete waste of time and money.
The products listed on their website are actually sold by other companies who have paid the owners of deals of America a fee for online exposure. In exchange, they put deals of America logos/links on their site and the owners of deals of America promote/advertise these companies using their website.
3) All “gift cards” are fake!
All the gift card discounts they advertise on their website as seen above are FAKE! They actually take the money from your credit card but do not deliver any product. The GIFT CARDS are just coupons/e-codes that can be activated by simply giving them your email address. This is the only way they are able to deliver their products, through your email!
Also take note that several of these coupons have already expired or will expire in a few days after you receive the coupon.
4) They are not providing the “instant discount” during checkout
You might have already noticed an issue with their website now that you know it’s all fake. The main thing is that they don’t apply the discounts until check-out, even if you use coupons with certain target gift cards (e.g Target gift card). For example, let’s say you have a coupon that will give an “instant” 20% off when using a $50 Target gift card. You visit deals of America, add the target gift card to your cart and apply the coupon after adding it. The price on the checkout page is not actually $40 (20% discount) but rather, the base price is $50, so you are still paying $50 if you go through with the checkout.
You will only see your discount in your shopping cart at the very end of the process when they ask for your credit card info! They’ll try to make it seem like there is an error in their system (e.g “discount not applied” etc) and the only way to get your discount is by giving them your credit card information. This is a major red flag because who would give their CC info without knowing how much they’re actually going to pay?
5) Everything else about this website is fake too!
Besides the fact that everything on their website is FAKE, they also try so hard to make it seem like everything is real, from the “job opportunities” they advertise on their site to the “customer service chat” at the bottom of every page. Don’t believe any of that, nobody works for this company and if you look closely some of those images have been edited in some way or another!
Also, there is no phone number for USA, the only available number on their site is a contact form which you can use instead. This means that nobody will ever get back to you through this contact form and it’s just another way of making everything seem more real than what it actually is.
6) They use Google Translate to create their website
The very first thing you’ll notice about this company is that they are using Google Translate to make their site seem like it’s in English. You can see below how the text on their homepage was translated directly from Russian! If you visit the original page (linked above), you will see what I mean for yourself. This is a huge red flag because it shows that they don’t care about providing a decent service to their clients since they are using Google Translate not only for the English version of their site but also for multiple other languages.
7) You will never know who is behind the website
Not only do you not know these people, but you cannot contact them anywhere besides their contact form on the website. They have no address for the USA, no phone number, and nobody has ever posted a picture of themselves or talked about this company anywhere online so you will never know who’s behind Deals of America.
8) Stolen images/illustrations
You can take a look at their “terms” page here to see that they are using stolen images in their “customer reviews” section. For example, in the image with the bullet-proof vest, if you zoom into it and look closely you will see that it’s actually a picture of Bruce Willis! Another example is this fishing pole which is actually an accurate illustration of a famous fishing pole called Shakespeare Ugly Stik!
9) Google search results for this company are suspicious and sketchy
Whenever you check the Google search results for their website, you’ll see that everything there is not only fake but also meant to mislead people into thinking this site is really legit. They use websites like “Google Maps” and “YellowPages” to create listings for their company, complete with a custom address for this “location” which you can find on the Google search results. This is not real and it’s just another way of making Deals of America seem more legit than what it actually is.
10) The website seems to have been created by some Russian individuals
The actual site was made in 2014 and the registration info for the site is hidden but based on a Russian phone number. This means that if you were to call this number, you would probably get someone speaking in Russian and not English. Also, if you check out Deals of America’s website source code, you will see some interesting metadata such as “google-site-verification: googlede74a90aa0c1fdeeae7.html” which means that their site is hosted on Google sites, another indication that this website has been created by some Russian individuals and not a legit company.
11) No way to contact these people or request a refund
There is no phone number listed on the website, no address for the USA, nothing like that to provide you with a way to contact these people or request a refund. Even if you did manage to get in touch with them through the website’s custom contact form (which is extremely unlikely), they won’t help your cause and will only reply with fake promises.
12) They say no refunds but it’s not really true
Although they claim to have a “No refunds” policy, this is not what these people are actually doing when it comes to their customers. When you look at the reviews for this company online, you will see that there are countless complaints about this website refusing to give refunds or not being able to give refunds. They will use this “No refunds” claim as an excuse to justify their illegal activity and because of that, you should NOT believe anything these people say. No matter what they tell you about having a no refunds policy, it’s very obvious that these scammers are lying and will never give a refund regardless of the situation.
13) The negative reviews for this website are mostly accurate
If you check out the review section on Deals of America’s website, you will see that most of the negative reviews written by customers there are very detailed and seem to be legit. For example, in one customer review a man says he ordered a TV from this site but after waiting for almost 3 months, he never got his TV or a refund. He says he has been trying to contact this website but never got a reply and eventually had to file a complaint with his bank so they can reverse the charges on his card. A lot of other reviews for Deals of America have similar stories and there is no doubt that these negative reviews are legit, not fake as you will assume at first.
14) This website is not BBB accredited
BBB stands for Better Business Bureau and this company is not BBB accredited which means that it doesn’t meet the standards of the Better Business Bureau (BBB). The reason why they’re not accredited by BBB is that they’re a fraud, scammers who won’t abide by the rules and regulations of BBB. If you look at other scam reports about Deals of America, a lot of them will mention this fact – that Deals of America is not BBB accredited which means they don’t follow the rules and regulations expected from legitimate businesses.
15) They use fake customer reviews on their deal of America website
In an attempt to make their website look like it’s better than what it actually is, Deals of America actually uses fake customer reviews on their own website. If you try to post an honest review on the site about how bad the service was or your experience with them was, they will remove it and not allow you to post it. They cannot afford to let legit people post their own negative experiences online because that will ruin the fake image of this company.
16) The website is full of grammatical errors
When you look at Deals of America’s website, you will notice a lot of grammatical errors which clearly indicates that these people who created this site aren’t native English speakers and didn’t hire anyone to help them with content on their page.
This is not something you would expect from a legitimate business so again, this should be another red flag for you to stay away from Deals of America!
