116 hijacked sites route Monica Vinader shoppers to shops selling its €119 necklace at €40
An exact-image search on seven official Monica Vinader product photos found them on pages of 116 unrelated websites, 56 with the Monica Vinader name in the page title. Opened from a Google link, 32 of those pages forwarded us to one of 16 shop domains, all registered on 25 September 2026 within 39 seconds of each other. The same search led to a wholesale listing and a retail store selling a lookalike of the Signature Link Diamond Ring with Monica Vinader's photographs, the engraved brand name removed from the ring. Our sweep of 11 lookalike domains found no copycat store.
- 116
- Unrelated websites showing the photos
- 16
- Shop domains registered in 39 seconds
- €40.14
- Heart Chain Necklace, vs €119
- 4
- Official ring photos on one wholesale listing
The €119 necklace at €40.14, same photo file
The official Heart Chain Necklace page leads with a studio shot of a puffed gold heart on a fine chain: €119 on the French storefront (£99 in the UK), €95.20 in the current online sale.
pugsalesjkl.click shows the same photograph because it is the same file, loaded from Monica Vinader's image server. It sells the necklace for €40.14, with viewer and stock counters that changed between our visits and a size menu of men's shoe sizes and children's sizes. The header reads buy sites. The footer claims a 2021 copyright for a domain registered the day before our visit.
The shop copies no photos. It points at the brand's own image server, so the pictures always look right.
What we caught
Official photos of the Heart Chain Necklace, Heart Locket, Nura Crossover Ring and Signature Link Diamond Ring appeared on 121 pages across 116 unrelated websites, from a pet-care business to a dental laboratory and a pizza takeaway. 56 of the sites carried the Monica Vinader name in the page title, 24 of them in Japanese.
Opened from a Google link, 32 of the pages sent us straight on to one of 16 .click shop domains. All 16 were registered through the same registrar on 25 September 2026, between 06:58:28 and 06:59:07 UTC, on the same pair of Cloudflare name servers.
The page we landed on lists 30 necklaces, mostly Monica Vinader styles, each €40.14 against a crossed-out €80.28. Its Heart Chain Necklace page loads the photo from Monica Vinader's own image server, the same file as the official page, where the necklace costs €119.
A wholesale listing sells a lookalike of the €219 Signature Link Diamond Ring from US$18.71, using four of the brand's photos. In the main product shot, the MONICA VINADER engraving inside the band has been retouched out. A retail store uses the same edited images for a €123.95 ring.
The evidence, channel by channel
Monica Vinader necklaces at €40.14 each, all marked down from €80.28.
The official shot shows MONICA VINADER engraved inside the band. Both copies have it retouched out.
Sold as a Unisex Irregular Band Ring from US$18.71, minimum order one piece.
€123.95, with the brand's product shot and on-model photos.
The brand's on-model photo, recropped. The copy matches the wholesale listing's file exactly.
Three DHgate sellers, US$22.07 to US$98.95, and a Shein listing use copies of the same product shot. Hash distances 2 to 8 out of 192. Built from listing data.
The official shot shows MONICA VINADER inside the band. All three DHgate copies have it retouched out.
Titled with the Monica Vinader Odyssey name, €5.69 to €6.04 each, minimum order 60, 100 sold. The photos match the £199 necklace's by eye.
SEK 20.75 each, minimum order 20. The product shot is the brand's Heart Locket photo, hash distance 2 out of 192.
Four wholesale listings from three suppliers put Monica Vinader in the title, from under €0.01 to €12.77.
16 shops, 39 seconds
The planted pages show different things to different visitors. The one we compared served a normal homepage when opened directly, a Monica Vinader necklace page to a search-engine crawler, and a one-line script to a visitor arriving from Google that forwarded them to a .click shop. Of the 121 pages, 32 on 31 sites forwarded us this way when we visited; the rest showed the host site, an error or nothing.
The 16 destination domains have names like pugsalesjkl.click and radsaleqaq.click. They share a registrar, name servers and a store template, and every price on them is exactly half a crossed-out one. Each forwarded visit lands on a keyword page built for the search that brought the visitor. On three of them, most products were Monica Vinader pieces, with 28 to 52 images loaded from the brand's servers and product names copied in places from retailer listings.
A Signature Link ring with the brand name painted out
The Signature Link Diamond Ring photos led somewhere else. A wholesale jewellery site lists an unbranded Unisex Irregular Band Ring from US$18.71, or US$17.59 each for 60 or more. Its two product shots match Monica Vinader's at combined image-hash distances of 6 and 5 (0 means identical), and its two on-model shots are the brand's photos, recropped. In the official product shot, MONICA VINADER is engraved inside the band. In the listing's copy, the engraving is gone.
A jewellery store on a domain registered in November 2025 sells the ring as the Friedgard 18K Gold Layered Pavé Ring for €123.95. It uses three of the same images: the edited product shot with its background removed, and both recropped on-model shots, which match the wholesale files exactly. The exact-image search also found the ring photo on three DHgate listings and a Shein listing. DHgate blocked our visits, but its listing data shows all three sellers using the same edited product shot, engraving removed, and on-model photos identical to the wholesale files, at US$22.07 to US$98.95 with no recorded sales. The Shein listing is reported from the image search only.
Monica Vinader in Alibaba titles, other channels quiet
On Alibaba, the scanner found four wholesale listings from three suppliers with Monica Vinader in the title: a Signature horseshoe ring at US$13.24 to $14.38, an Odyssey moonstone pendant at US$6.40 to $6.80, and two stainless-steel bracelets. The moonstone pendant listing, which reports 100 sold, uses product and on-model photos the exact-image search also finds on Monica Vinader's Odyssey pages. A fifth listing sells a heart pendant for SEK 20.75 with the brand's Heart Locket product shot, an image-hash match, plus two more photos indexed on the brand's own pages. Alibaba required a slider verification, so these details come from listing data, and we could not confirm what the suppliers ship.
The other channels were quiet. eBay returned 20 Monica Vinader listings from $19.87 to $799, eight of them pre-owned, from sellers we could not match to the brand; we saw nothing showing they are counterfeit. Amazon returned unbranded jewellery and other labels, and Temu returned nothing. Among the lookalike domains, monicavinadersale.com redirects to the official site, several others are parked or for sale, and monicavinaderstore.com has lapsed. Our TikTok and Meta ad searches returned errors, so those channels were not covered.
How to shut it down
The takedown plan, step by step, built from the evidence above.
Archive the chain before it's replaced
Save the planted page titles, the forwarding scripts and the 16 .click shop pages with their registration records, before the domains change.
Report all 16 domains in one batch
Send them to the registrar and to Cloudflare together, showing the 39-second registration window and the shops loading your photos from your own servers.
Lead with the missing engraving
File image-rights notices against the wholesale listing, the retail store, and the DHgate and Shein listings, with the original ring photos. The erased engraving shows the images are edited copies of your photographs.
Lock down your image server
Stop other sites loading product photos from your servers. The shops would lose their pictures at once, and requests from new ones could show up in your server logs.
A €40 necklace that looks like the real thing
The shops were a day old when we found them and may be gone within the week. Their pages, prices and domains are cheap to replace. What they can't replace is the traffic from planted pages already indexed under the Monica Vinader name, and the photographs that make a €40 necklace look like the real thing.
Those photographs belong to the brand. A shopper paying €40.14 sees Monica Vinader's own image, served from Monica Vinader's own server, and has no reason to doubt it. On the ring, someone took the trouble to paint out the brand's name before selling a copy.
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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