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Last year we had a number of sites flagged to us that were producing fake advent calendars. Whilst we worked hard last year to shut these down, we wanted to dust off this blog post ahead of December 1st;

These websites (in various regions around the world) are purporting to sell Drinks By The Dram Advent Calendars at unusually low prices.

When we took a look at these sites, kindly flagged to us by some of our regular customers, the retail prices were incredibly low and although they were using our imagery and pack shots, they were most definitely NOT selling genuine Drinks By The Dram advent calendars and had not been authorised by us as proper resellers as far as we could determine.

We leapt into action and took all possible steps to get these websites contacted in order to have these, obviously not genuine, products taken down.  We had some degree of success with approaches to domain registries and other routes, but the fight continued as more sites were reported to us.

It has now become apparent that these sites were not just fishing for purchasers who would eventually give up chasing their $50 spend when their calendar didn’t arrive, some are actually creating and selling counterfeit versions of our calendars.

These calendars are not filled with 24 hand-waxed drams of delicious spirits, but instead come with some small, empty bottles and an array of cheap trinkets and key fobs.  Very much NOT the Drinks By The Dram calendar experience.

While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these people are nothing more than fakers and counterfeiters, passing off crappy calendars as the genuine article and, in doing so, ruining the Christmas celebrations of many people - something which we will not accept under any circumstances.

Founder of Atom Brands, home of Drinks By The Dram, Justin Petszaft commented:

“What kind of dickhead do you have to be to scam people like this, knowing that you’re going to ruin someone’s Christmas when they open up the first window and find a used plaster and a candy corn instead of a delicious dram of single malt whisky? The people perpetrating this obvious scam are utterly shameless. Don’t get taken in, don’t let your friends get taken in, and if you’ve been defrauded by one of these assholes contact PayPal immediately and get your money back"

 “We’ve obviously contacted everyone we can about this – PayPal, the domain registry, the web hosts and other platform providers, but as soon as one site gets taken down, two more pop up in their place.”

So please be on the lookout for these fake calendars.  These are the steps we would ask you to take:

• If the pricing seems low compared to other sites where you have seen our calendars, please check on https://drinksbythedram.com/collections/christmas-calendars for our stated RRP.  If it then looks too good to be true, it is almost certainly a fake and you should buy from us, or from one of our trusted partners such as https://www.masterofmalt.com or  https://thespiritco.com/collections/advent-calendars

• The fake calendars are easy to spot should you purchase one:
  1) Even before you open any of the windows to find the absence of drams, there are numerous spelling mistakes on the packaging such as “Calenday”, “Advane” and “Hane waxed”.
  2) We do all our dramming and build all our calendars in the UK so if you are seeing your order being fulfilled from China or “Made in China” on the box, be assured it is NOT a Drinks By The Dram calendar.  If you have already placed your order, cancel it at the earliest opportunity.  If you’re not certain that your order has been shipped by a genuine retailer (e.g. if it was sent from China), at the very least (and if you are able to), refuse to sign for and do not accept the delivery at the door so the order will be returned to the seller.

• If you have purchased a calendar and it does NOT have 24 wax sealed drams inside it, you have NOT bought a Drinks By The Dram calendar and you should immediately seek a refund from the website, or via your credit card issuer or PayPal and report the site in question to them.

• In this instance, we would be really grateful if you would also contact us at customerservice@drinksbythedram.com so that we can add that retailer to our list of those we want to stop using our name, selling fake calendars and ruining the Christmas of the many people looking for bargains at this time.

Thank you for reading and we want to take this opportunity to wish all our followers and customers, old and new, an extremely Merry Christmas, a prosperous New Year and successful avoidance of online scams!