Cyclists warned about fake Rapha site offering “too good to be true” deals

Cyclists hoping to snag some post-Christmas bargains have been warned that a website purporting to belong to British premium cycling clothing company Rapha – and offering massive discounts as part of an apparent “year-end clearance sale” – is a scam engineered to gather unsuspecting customers’ credit card details.

Rapha says it is aware of a “recent surge” in fake websites bearing the brand’s name, and is currently working to have the scam sites removed as quickly as possible.

The latest website in question, raphacycling-sale.shop, was first registered on 30 December 2024 by Hong Kong-based domain registration company West263 International, and appears to be owned by a user based in the Chinese province of Jiangxi.

The site uses a number of images and videos which appear on Rapha’s official and genuine site, rapha.cc, while adopting some of the company’s promotional language.

The fake Rapha site

However, a more-than-cursory glance at the new website reveals a host of discrepancies, including the lack of Rapha’s trademark font and an array of glaring typos, mistakes, and grammatical errors in the seemingly hastily pasted text.

Meanwhile, the fake site’s ‘Life by Bike’ subsection, which on the official version links to articles on the brand’s events such as the Festive 500, simply leads to more products, while the social media links located at the top of the site are connected to either the app in question’s homepage or the ‘Rapha sale’ site itself.

The biggest red flag, however, is the massive and improbable discounting seemingly on offer. While Rapha’s official site is currently holding a sale with savings of up to 40 per cent – and up to 50 per cent on selected outfits – the scam site claims to offer “50 to 90 per cent” off all products as part of a “year-end clearance sale”.

Some of the fake site’s mega ‘offers’

For example, Rapha’s women’s ProTeam TT aerosuit, which normally retails at £400 (though as with most other products featured in the ‘sale’, the scam site has bumped this RRP up by around £12), is apparently available for just £61.74.

The normally £300 ProTeam shoes, meanwhile, are supposedly on sale for just £46.93, the same discounted ‘price’ as Rapha’s ProTeam Powerweave bib shorts.

As improbable as these heavily slashed prices may be, they have, however, already caught out a few bargain-hunting cyclists.

On New Year’s Eve, one would-be customer posted on a cycling Facebook page that his attempts to purchase items worth around NZ$145 (roughly £65) by entering his credit card details on the ‘sale’ site failed after the transaction was declined.

“Is the Rapha sale too good to be true? Two different credit cards have not worked,” the poster said, while another also claimed to have lost US$120 (around £97) thanks to the scam.

Rapha’s genuine site and winter sale

The failure of the first poster’s transaction suggests, as we have seen before in similar cycling company-related scams, that the scammers behind the website are attempting to collect a list of valid card numbers from customers, which can then be sold on the black market.

> Fake deal-laden Giro UK website a scam, warns distributor

Rapha has been targeted in this manner before, including earlier this year, while in May helmet and clothing manufacturer Giro also confirmed that a fake site had been set up by scammers with the aim of extracting credit or debit card information from customers.

The website, girouk.com, appeared at first glance to be a very convincing replica of the official Giro website, offering deals – usually a nominal discount of around £10 – on almost all of the brand’s products. However, Zyro Fisher, Giro’s UK distributor, soon confirmed that the site was a scam.

When contacted by road.cc, a spokesperson for Rapha also confirmed this week that the company is aware of a recent surge in fake sites bearing the brand’s name appearing over the last six months, and has received several emails from concerned customers warning about the scams or asking if the sites are legitimate.

The British brand says it has been monitoring the issue closely, and is currently working with an IP protection specialist to enforce cease and desist action to have the fake sites removed as quickly as possible, while also issuing pre-emptive guidance to customers to help them avoid falling victim to scammers.

The prospect of online scammers creating fake websites purporting to be well-known cycling manufacturers or retailers in a bid to swindle consumers has been a worryingly common one in recent years.

In August 2023, Giant warned customers of a scam website pretending to sell the manufacturer’s products, which it successfully attempted to remove. Giant’s risk manager Alan Needle said at the time that he was “not sure” if any customers had been affected.

The website, posing as Giant Bicycles’ US domain, was also investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, the body which investigates online scams in the United States, as well as Giant’s Taiwan-based legal team.

Like the Rapha and Giro scams, the fake Giant site followed the pattern of many other fraudulent websites we have reported on in the past few years, using an at first glance believable website, but featuring clear red flags, such as payment options including cryptocurrency, cash app, or ‘bankwire transfer’.

However, unlike these other examples, Giant’s site included no credit or debit card option when ‘purchasing’, while its website – like Rapha’s fake counterpart – was riddled with poorly written information full of spelling errors.

The rapid rise of scam cycling websites in recent years owed much to the lockdown boom in bike sales, with criminals hoping to profit from the increased demand by selling from fake websites claiming to offer tempting discounts to buyers.

> Bike shortage sees scammers target shoppers with fake websites

In November 2022, we reported that FSA, SRAM, and DMR had all reported fake sites during the autumn, with fraudsters apparently keen to make money from bargain hunters in the lead-up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas.

In 2018 too, Scott warned customers about fake websites with "too good to be true" prices, claiming to offer discounts of up to 90 per cent.

> Beware! More fake bike websites trying to scam you

Limited availability and supply chain issues have also brought the problem of counterfeit products being sold online as cyclists were left searching far and wide for certain products and components.

In 2022 we spoke to Shimano about the issue, resulting in this handy feature to help you spot counterfeit bike components and avoid getting ripped off.