Launched in late 2022, the ecommerce Temu app has soared to success today, with 167 million monthly active users worldwide.
It’s incredibly popular in the US right now: One in every three Americans has made a purchase through Temu in the past 12 months. Last year, the company’s gross merchandise value hit $15.33 billion, although the company prices everything so cheaply that it still lost billions in revenue that year.
Thanks to all this sudden success, scammers are flocking to the app as well, aiming to get a tiny chunk of those dozens of billions being spent each year. As always, scammers are adept at finding any tiny crack in Temu’s security, from social engineering tricks to false claims of free Xbox gift cards.
Here are the biggest categories of Temu scams to know about.
What Are Temu Scams?
Temu is a huge ecommerce platform right now, and growing fast. That means that it’s the most recent ecommerce platform to have a huge userbase of online shoppers with cash to spend – and that’s a recipe for the potential victims that will always attract scam artists.
Temu offers users a seemingly endless stream of cheap products, covering everything from knick-knacks to fast fashion clothing to more knick-knacks. The low prices and frequent deals make the service a cheap way to stay on top of new trends. But those same prices are also raising
Is Temu itself a scam? No.
Temu isn’t a scam site – although it might get fairly close to one, depending on who you ask.
Temu is incredibly cheap in part because it’s losing tons of money: $3.56 billion in 2023, to be precise. You could call that a scam if you want, but most people call it typical ecommerce strategy. By staying cheap, the company can grow rapidly and squeeze the competition until they’re eventually so big they can set their own prices.
Temu’s weathered a few lawsuits that suggested actual scams could be powering its rapid rise, however: Last October, Shein dropped a suit that had alleged Temu paid social media influencers to critize Shein, and had even made fake accounts to promote Temu by falsely implying Shein and Temu were the same brand.
Is Temu ethical? Probably not.
Finally, Temu has plenty of critics when it comes to ethics: Like many fast fashion platforms, Temu’s environmental impact and labor conditions are ultimately bad for the world, according to fashion watchdog Good on You, which rated Temu among the worst offenders of 2023.
Check out the main types of Temu-related scam to know about below – along with our best advice on how to defeat them.
Temu Phishing Scams
You’re checking your email inbox one day and you see a familar orange logo. Looks like Temu sent you another great deal! Wow, an entire free palate of stuff just for filling out a survey? You’re just a few short survey questions away from being scammed.
Temu has 50 million actively monthly users in the US, and many millions more have signed up for an account. That’s a huge chunk of the online population of the US who expect to see Temu promotion emails in their inboxes, which means that completely unrelated third-party scammers can safely impersonate the ecommerce company with phishing emails – emails that are simply “fishing” for your personal credit card information by dangling attractive lies.
Here’s one example of a phishing email, with a design that mimics an official email that Temu might send to its audiences.
A scam email phishing for personal information in the form of a fake Temu survey. Source: Reddit
The emails might claim to require a survey, might offer free promotional codes and discounts, or might simply ask for a small fee for shipping you free products. Eventually, however, it will ask for your credit card details or simply download malware to your desktop.
This scam can be particularly tough to stay wary of, since Temu really does send out a ton of promo emails, and these genuine emails often center on great deals or free items.
How to avoid this scam: Check the email address – official marketing emails will be sent from an address with the “temuemail.com” domain. This isn’t the only metric you should check, however, as domains can be faked.
Instead, never click on a link directly from an email – navigate to the official site in order to stay safe. Always remember that, if you are suspicious, you can report the email at the company’s official customer service page.
Temu Gift Card Promotions
Scammers on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and any other social media site love pretending to give away gift cards. Everyone’s using Temu these days, so the scammers are pretending to give away Temu gift cards, and placing ads on popular platforms to reach as many potential victim as they can.
The basic scam remains the same as when they were pretending to give you, say, Amazon gift cards: They just want your personal infomation, and you’ll never see a single gift card cent. The same goes for similar ads that claim to offer other items through Temu, from Fortnite skins to leaked celebrity photos.
You might also run into a misleading promotion instead of an outright scam, however: Some companies run opaque promotions that dangle the possibility of hundreds of dollars in savings in front of you, but require you to download apps, shop online, and play games in order to qualify – efforts that might take you weeks and may even result in limited discounts rather than the seemingly free gift cards that you thought you were getting at first.
This $750 Temu savings ad might not be a scam, but it’s unlikely to be worth the effort, according to those who have tried to qualify. Source: Twitter
Some internet users have discussed their failures to qualify for deals from Instagram ads that promised to give them $750 towards their Paypal, CashApp, or Shein accounts. Temu is now among the platforms that these questionable deal offers will use to attract eyeballs.
How to avoid this: We recommend not bothering to try jumping through all the hoops to get these deals in the first place. If you’re after money-saving promotional deals, try an official channel. The only reason you’ll see a social media advertisement offering you free money is if the people making the ad are earning more money off of you.
Temu Counterfeits
Phishing emails and social media ads might scam you when you’re not inside the Temu app itself. However, you’re not entirely out of danger even when using the official app. This is because the platform uses third-party sellers, and some of those sellers are out to scam you.
These scams can come in the form of counterfeit products: Brand-name items might actually be ripoffs. Last year, Business Insider caught counterfeit Air Jordans on Temu, with one example selling for a tidy $27.47. According to that report, Temu was even slower than Shein when it came to removing the fake Jordans.
However, Temu has added a “verification badge” feature aimed at highlighting the most trustworthy sellers on its platform. The badge isn’t a sign that you’ll never be ripped off, but it’s better than nothing.
More trusted sellers will have a blue checkmark next to their name within the Temu app. Source: Avast
Some seller may even send you a cartoonishly small item after lying about the size, or might even simply never send you the item you paid for.
How to avoid this scam: Try to stick to popular sellers with a long track record of positive reviews, and ideally those with a verification badge. Also, stay suspicious of deals that seem too good to be true, even by Temu’s standards. Ultimately, you can never be 100% certain that you’ll avoid counterfeits or ripoffs, however.
Temu Xbox Scams
Xbox Live users are seeing a wave of spam message requests in 2024, and Temu is front and center.
Troops of spammers will create masses of throwaway accounts soley in order to bother other players with lies aimed at stealing personal information. It’s a numbers game: They’ll send a thousand messages to get a response from one or two gullible 12-year-olds with access to their parents’ credit credits.
Here’s what one example of what a typical Temu Xbox spam message might look like, taken from a post on the Microsoft Community forums.
An example of the text that you might find in a scammer’s Xbox message. Source: Microsoft
As you might recall from our gift card scam explainer above, it’s a fair bet that no company will ever give away free gift cards unprompted. They’d never use a random account in a message request folder to announce it, either.
How to avoid this scam: This is another category of scam that you can stay completely safe from by following one simple trick – Never respond to an Xbox Live message request that promises to give you anything for free. Personally, I wouldn’t respond to any Xbox Live message requests.
