6 fake Medik8 stores sell its £229 retinoid cream for as little as $45.80
6 live stores sell Medik8's catalogue under the Medik8 name and wordmark, with Medik8's own product photos, at 50% to 80% off: medik8beauty.com, medik8s.com, medik8skincare.com, medik8shop.shop, medik8beauty.shop and medik8official.shop. Our domain sweep turned up the live stores, and one store's footer pointed us to another.
- 6
- Live fake storefronts
- $45.80
- Lowest r-Retinoate Intense price (£229 official)
- 4 of 6
- Stores on one hosting network
- 96%
- Highest visual similarity
The closest copy scored 96% against medik8.com
Medik8's own site is a restrained skincare store: the serif Medik8 wordmark, a navigation bar with shop, regimes and an AI skin advisor, and prices in pounds with free UK delivery over £25.
medik8beauty.com keeps the same wordmark in the same place and opens with a gift-set banner under a strip reading "Up to 80% Off & Free Shipping". The visual assessment rated it 96% similar to the official homepage, with 98% confidence that it is a copy. medik8s.com scored 93% and uses "Official Medik8 UK Site", the same page title as medik8.com.
A £229 night cream, Medik8's own photograph and a $45.80 price tag.
What we caught
Each domain adds one word or letter to the brand: s, beauty, skincare, shop or official. medik8beauty.com was registered on 12 February 2026. medik8s.com and medik8skincare.com were both registered on 26 August 2026, through different registrars.
All six stores use Medik8's product photos. On medik8beauty.com and medik8s.com, the r-Retinoate Intense image is the exact file on medik8.com. 66 of medik8s.com's 77 lead images keep the file names Medik8 gave them.
medik8s.com takes 50% off everything. medik8shop.shop and medik8official.shop advertise 65%, medik8skincare.com and medik8beauty.shop 70%, and medik8beauty.com up to 80%. r-Retinoate Intense costs £229 on medik8.com and $45.80 on medik8beauty.com.
medik8beauty.com, medik8shop.shop, medik8beauty.shop and medik8official.shop all resolved to IP addresses on the same hosting network. The three .shop stores also run the same storefront software, with identical sitemap and image-folder structures.
The evidence, store by store
£229 officially. $45.80 to $114.99 on five of the fake stores.
The same image file Medik8 publishes, reused to sell the cream at 80% off.
Registered 26 August 2026. It uses the official site's page title and marks everything down 50%.
A Shopify store calling itself an authorised US retailer, claiming 1,356 reviews.
French-language copy of the product description, $114.99 against an invented $328.54 original price.
Titled Medik8 Official Store, with 65% off and the same storefront system as the two French stores.
A 'Medik8 Hydr8 B5 Intense' listing at US $26.12, minimum six pieces, uses Medik8's own packshot (image-hash distance 4 out of 192) with the label wiped off. Built from listing data, because Alibaba showed a verification check.
Same bottle, same reflections. Medik8's version reads 'Medik8 / Hydr8 B5 Intense'. The listing's version has no text on it.
The label-less bottle reappears in four new scenes, one captioned 'MEDIK8 HYDR8 B5'. Medik8 sells the serum for £60.
One store's footer names another
The six stores come in three builds. medik8beauty.com and medik8s.com run on WordPress with WooCommerce and list 98 and 77 products. medik8s.com even copied a live Medik8 campaign about taking VAT off sunscreen, including the line that the offer is only available on medik8.com. medik8beauty.com's search box still suggests "Sweater, Jacket, Shirt", and its footer names a different domain: an email address and copyright line for medik8skincare.
medik8skincare.com is live too, a Shopify store titled "Medik8 US Authorized Retail Shop - Discount Medik8-US". All 87 of its products were created on 31 August 2026 and cut by 70%. Its r-Retinoate Intense page claims 4.8 stars from 1,356 reviews and 1,000 units in stock.
The three .shop stores share one storefront system. medik8shop.shop and medik8beauty.shop are in French and price in dollars. medik8shop.shop lists r-Retinoate Intense at $114.99 against an "original" price of $328.54, well above Medik8's own £229. medik8official.shop is in English and calls itself the Medik8 Official Store. Their product sitemaps list 51, 48 and 55 products, last updated between March and May 2026.
The retinoid photo is byte-for-byte Medik8's
We downloaded product images from each store and compared them with the images in Medik8's own product feed, using perceptual image hashes after trimming plain backgrounds. The r-Retinoate Intense photo on medik8beauty.com and medik8s.com is byte-for-byte identical to Medik8's file. medik8skincare.com, medik8shop.shop and medik8beauty.shop use the same photo re-encoded, at a hash distance of 2 out of 192. medik8official.shop reuses a C-Tetra Luxe gallery image at the same distance.
Not every image matches what medik8.com shows today. medik8s.com's lead image for Liquid Peptides Advanced MP is a version of Medik8's packshot carrying a 2025 beauty-award badge.
An Alibaba 'Medik8' serum with the label wiped off
The marketplaces were quieter. All 20 Amazon listings in the scan were sold by an account named Medik8. The 20 eBay listings came from resellers whose stock we could not trace, so we are not calling them counterfeit. AliExpress and Temu returned no Medik8-branded products. One Alibaba listing offered 'Medik8 Unisex Hydr8 B5 Intense Serum' at US $26.12 with a minimum order of six. The page required human verification, so we read its data and photos from a search scrape. Its main photo is Medik8's own Hydr8 B5 Intense packshot, image-hash distance 4 out of 192, with the Medik8 name and product text removed from the bottle. The other four photos put the same unlabelled bottle in new scenes, one captioned 'MEDIK8 HYDR8 B5'. Medik8 sells the serum for £60.
We placed no orders, so we cannot say what any of the six stores would ship. Several other Medik8 domains were registered but not trading: medik8.online and medik8.site served no store, and medik8care.com showed a blank page. Image search also found Medik8 product pages indexed on a handful of unrelated websites, which showed their own content or an error when we opened them.
How to shut it down
The takedown plan, step by step, built from the evidence above.
Archive all 6 stores
Preserve homepages, product pages, prices, footers, sitemaps and DNS records before the operators move to new domains.
File once with the shared host
Send one evidence package covering the four stores on the same hosting network, with the matching product photos attached.
Report medik8skincare.com to Shopify
Also submit medik8s.com to its DNS proxy provider to identify the origin host, then file with that host.
Watch Medik8-plus-one-word domains
Flag new Medik8 domains that add a letter or retail word, such as s, shop, beauty, skincare or official, and new sites reusing your image files.
6 domains, likely fewer operators
None of these stores faked a single product photo. Medik8 publishes clean, high-resolution packshots, and six stores downloaded them and slashed the prices. A shopper paying $45.80 for a £229 retinoid has no way to know what is in the jar, and if it goes wrong, Medik8 is the name they know.
The domains look like six separate problems. Shared hosting, shared storefront software and one footer naming another store suggest fewer operators than the domain count implies, and fewer filings to shut them down.
Scan your own brand
What would the scanner find around your brand?
Run the same sweep across lookalike domains, storefronts, marketplaces, ads, and social accounts.
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