“It was so cheap it was unheard of,” says Ruth (last name withheld by request), a healthcare professional in Texas. In February 2022, a Facebook ad popped up on her smartphone with a deal on Maine lobster tails that seemed too good to pass up. “There were a lot of red flags, but it was a legitimate company,” she says. The online seller claimed to be Regalis Foods, a well-known purveyor of seafood and other high-end culinary goods based in New York.
As soon as Ruth filled in her PayPal and contact information, an email popped up from an unknown address. Her $238 worth of lobster tails never arrived and, within a week, all of the associated emails had disappeared from her Gmail account, only to be replaced by streams of bizarre ads and phishing messages.
“There was an article on my news stream about warning signs for scam emails and this basically involved everything they listed: the poor grammar, the typos, the too-good-to-be-true, the immediacy. I feel duped, but PayPal tells me there’s nothing they can do,” Ruth says.
Ruth is just one of more than 1,000 customers who have fallen victim to online scammers impersonating Regalis Foods since January 2022. While some of these orders are small, the average claim is around $200. According to Ian Purkayastha, owner and founder of Regalis Foods, the alleged total of stolen funds is more than $200,000.
“That’s just the number of transactions we know about,” Purkayastha says. He worries about customers that…
