To the many middle-class women hunting for an elegant event dress, Norbury of London and Avery Lane seem like the perfect choice. But as the Mail’s investigation finds, the reality is VERY different
Silky. Champagne-coloured. A satin ribbon waistband and flattering three-quarter length sleeves. The dress ticked all the boxes for Suzanne Wingrove as she searched for an outfit to wear to a wedding this April.
It was sold by Norbury of London, a clothes company promoting itself online with pictures of beautifully dressed 60-something women standing in front of an archetypal British store.
On sale with 50pc off, she was promised hassle-free returns and delivery of her dress in five to eight days.
In fact, says Suzanne, 66, a retired HR adviser from Eastbourne, East Sussex: ‘The thing that convinced me more than anything is they sent all their parcels by Royal Mail.’
But it took three weeks for Suzanne’s dress to arrive – and it looked nothing like the frock advertised online.
‘The material was thin. There were short butterfly sleeves. It was a wraparound dress, with a big flap at the front. It was poorly made and there were no labels. It wasn’t what I ordered.’
Despite the name, Norbury of London wasn’t a British retailer at all, but one of an increasing number of websites generated using artificial intelligence to trick customers into thinking they’re shopping at a prestige local store.
The customer is then sent poor quality clothes from China that cost a pittance to make and bear little resemblance to what they ordered – if they’re sent anything at all, that is.
The chances are you’ve come across an advert for one of these charming boutiques on your social media feed recently.
Perhaps you’ve also been tempted by their quintessentially English vibe, flawless sales blurb and expensively cut clothes, usually sold at enticing discounts.
At first glance, there’s little about these sites to sound alarm bells. Which is precisely why they’re so insidious.
There has been a 95pc increase in fake online shops in the first six months of 2026, recent research by online safety company Norton found.
Suzanne Wingrove, 66, says she feels ‘stupid and angry’ after ordering a dress from Norbury of London
‘These aren’t one-off scams built by a lone fraudster – they’re mass-produced, with criminals using AI to clone a legitimate brand or to create a new, authentic-looking, attractive brand in minutes, right down to the logo and fake customer reviews,’ says Leyla Bilge, global head of scam research at Norton.
If you complain, you usually face a string of convoluted emails written in immaculate English from the site (likely to be from an AI bot) offering a percentage off your purchase, or a future purchase, to save you the hassle of sending it back.
If you insist on a refund, like Suzanne, you risk losing more money.
Told she had to return the £49 dress at her own expense, she paid £25 to send her dress back to China in May – where it has been held in customs ever since.
Norbury of London, meanwhile, has stopped replying to her emails – and its website has vanished. ‘I’d been had. I was angry. I feel stupid,’ says Suzanne, who is a widow.
She’s far from alone. Three in five Britons are more concerned about AI-generated scams than they were a year ago, according to cyber-security firm McAfee, with only 29pc confident they can spot a scam online.
Even those well-versed in spotting fraud can fall prey, as Vix Leyton, a consumer finance expert from Sheffield, found out this summer.
‘I’ve worked at cash back sites, price comparison sites. I consider myself scam safe,’ says Vix. ‘I’m quite cynical.’
When the dress arrived after three weeks, Suzanne found ‘it was poorly made and there were no labels’
Nonetheless, last month, after six months of a dress advertised by Ayla and Ash London constantly showing up on her Facebook and Instagram feeds via targeted adverts, she capitulated.
It was ‘a proper event dress’, says Vix, with ‘a big floating skirt, a nice trim, big statement sleeves and pockets. The woman in the ad was standing in this big aspirational clothing closet’.
The £100 dress was being sold at 40pc off, ‘which felt right for the quality – expensive enough that you believe it’s legitimate’, she adds.
Another draw was that the company appeared to be run by two sisters forced to sell their stock cheaper or go out of business. Or so the social media stories claimed.
Business owner stories designed to pull at the heartstrings are often flaunted on these scam sites, and blend effortlessly into the confessional eco-system of social media, Vix now realises. For her, the sisters’ sob story was the clincher.
‘Not only was I getting a beautiful dress, I was helping.’ Even as she waited a month for her dress to turn up, she reminded herself she was buying from a small boutique with a big sale on and ‘gave them the benefit of the doubt’.
Then the parcel arrived in a jiffy bag, from China.
‘The whole thing stank of plastic. I know that’s the hallmark of mass-produced factory items. The dress was not satin but proper flammable polyester. There was exposed stitching all over it. It didn’t bear any resemblance to the picture [in the advert]. My heart sank. I knew I had been scammed, which was embarrassing.’
An elegant dress advertised on ‘Ayla and Ash’. After a Google image search, experts found the same image appeared on multiple similar websites
Vix Leyton modelling the dress from ‘Ayla and Ash’, which she said ‘stank of plastic’ and was evidently mass-produced
Exposed stitching can be seen on the dress, which was made from a cheap polyester
Vix, who used Apple Pay to purchase her dress, didn’t bother trying to get a refund.
Instead she did a reverse Google image search – a tool in Google images that allows you to upload a photograph to find out where else the image has appeared online – of the dress she’d seen advertised, and discovered it appeared on at least ten other ‘tiny, boutique sites, all with slightly different names, slightly different sob stories’.
The online reviews of others who’d ordered it were scathing, and in one respect Vix considers herself lucky. ‘The majority of people suggested nothing arrived.’
She had ‘assumed a level of due diligence would be done by Instagram and Facebook’ before they posted the adverts.
Meta policy states adverts must not promote products, services, schemes or offers using identified deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to scam people out of money or personal information.
But research this February by cyber-security research organisation Gen Threat Labs found nearly one in three adverts on Meta – their parent company – run across the EU and UK over 23 days led to a scam, phishing or malware link.
A Meta spokesman said: ‘We are investigating the content brought to our attention.’
For Vix, the scam was ‘a wake-up call’, making her realise she was ‘operating by rules that were true a few years ago’ but outdated in an AI era.
‘Avery Lane Brighton’ uses convincing AI-generated imagery on its website to make it appear to be an independently owned British business
How to spot the warning signs
It is easy to be tempted in by glossy social media adverts. One site widely reported to be shipping poor quality goods from China according to Trust Pilot reviews is named Avery Lane Brighton.
I sent the details to Jonathan Frost, global advisory director at cyber-security company BioCatch, for him to assess the red flags
The two main images on Avery Lane’s home page are an older and younger woman implied to be a mother and daughter baking a cake in a country-style kitchen, and its charming pistachio coloured shop front with pot plants lined outside.
Frost, who has led the City of London Police’s National Fraud and Cyber-crime Reporting system, believes the ‘mother and daughter’ images are likely created by software called GAN, or Generative Adversarial Network, which creates lifelike pictures of people.
‘They’re not composites or pictures of other people, necessarily. These people probably don’t exist.’
He is trained to spot the telltale signs, but suggests those of us who aren’t upload the pictures into an AI chatbot such as Claude, and ask for its verdict.
Claude instantly picked up on a fake whisk on the kitchen table of the Avery Lane advert, sandals that ‘dissolve into physically incoherent loops’ and a clothes rail that appears to float – all hallmarks of AI-generated imagery.
‘One of the best defences to AI initiated fraud is, ironically, for many people, AI,’ Frost says.
He also advises entering any address listed on a website as a point of contact into Google Maps – in Avery Lane’s case, the Brighton address cited as its business centre is actually a hotel, ‘which should set alarm bells ringing’, while the number supplied, which ends in ‘123456’ doesn’t connect.
The site isn’t traceable on Companies House – the Government’s official register of companies which is ‘another significant warning sign’, Frost points out.
Avery Lane was only registered this June, which contradicts the blurb on its site that its clothes have been created to ‘feel as good as they look, season after season’.
In an age of AI, Frost says, ‘people should train themselves to look for some of those artefacts’.
Meanwhile, the name of Avery Lane’s merchant – the business that receives your payment which PayPal is required to list on the payment page if you use this method – is a private company registered in Hong Kong, connected on Facebook to a ‘very significant number of similar shops targeting German consumers’, he adds.
It’s possible Avery Lane is one of many sites run by the same company, he says.
‘AI gives you that opportunity to scale. My gut feeling on this occasion is it will be a group of people. I’m sure this particular entity will be in a continuous process of shutting down sites, creating new sites,’ he adds.
As well as selling cheap clothes at a vastly inflated mark-up, the criminals behind the sites are also acquiring valuable data that can be sold to data brokers.
‘A name, address and email address is pretty high-quality stuff,’ he says. If you’ve been scammed by these sites, change your passwords and be alert for suspicious emails.
Gwyneth Dearden, 64, a company director from Lancashire, bought two linen shift dresses for £69.90 from Victoria & Louise London after seeing them advertised on Facebook this April.
The company guaranteed money back if customers were unhappy. ‘They looked beautiful,’ she says. But when they arrived three weeks later ‘the material was shocking. They were completely see through’.
She paid £25 to send the dresses back to a nine-line-long Chinese address, the second of which is ‘No.2 freight elevator on the west side of the 3rd floor’.
It’s the same address Suzanne was told to return her Norbury of London dress to. Like Suzanne’s, Gwyneth has been notified by the Royal Mail that it is still stuck in customs.
Ros Gent, 79, a retired teacher, was also told to return the two ‘cheap, synthetic’ dresses she bought this April from another boutique, Arthur and Violet London, for £54, to this address.
She spent £27 on postage – and never heard from the company again. Last week her dresses were returned to her home in Guisborough, North Yorkshire.
‘I knew I would have to pay to return, but thinking I’d have to return it to London, not China,’ says Ros. ‘I was annoyed. I felt stupid.’
Because these sites aren’t based in the UK ‘our police can’t do much about them’, says Frost, who adds that those behind them are ‘effectively operating in a grey area’.
When money has been exchanged for a product, on the surface a contract might appear to have been satisfied.
‘In order for it to be fraud, under our law, you have to demonstrate dishonesty as the prerequisite. The question is whether there is dishonesty behind the misrepresentation, or if it’s just a really badly run business that ships inferior products,’ says Frost.
With regards to Avery Lane, he says, ‘the fact this business doesn’t exist, that the people in the pictures probably don’t exist is probably the strongest evidence of dishonesty’.
But, he adds, ‘the safest place to put this would be under Consumer Protection Law’.
Traders must clearly provide their geographical address and trading address, if they are different, adds consumer rights expert Scott Dixon, and ‘if goods have to be returned to a different address, this should be made clear, along with who pays the return costs’.
He adds: ‘If you were misled into believing you were buying from a UK-based retailer and they did not clearly state the returns address, it’s a breach of contract.
‘In these circumstances, you are entitled to a refund and the retailer cannot charge you to return the goods.’
If the site refuses to refund you, contact your bank or credit card provider to make a chargeback claim to reverse your payment.
‘Chargeback is a voluntary scheme banks subscribe to. Stress the trader is in “breach of contract” as chargebacks are often declined on the first attempt,’ says Dixon, who describes fake shops as ‘a massive problem catching consumers out.’
Fortunately, Suzanne, Gwyneth and Ros were all refunded their purchases by their banks – although all were left out of pocket for the cost of returning their clothing to China.
I approached all the websites in this investigation for comment. My email to Ayla and Ash bounced back. None of the others replied.
Only Avery Lane’s website is still active. In the space of months, the others have gone, ‘designed to be thrown away and replaced the moment they’re reported’, says Bilge.
As Gwyneth puts it: ‘In China they’re making these dresses for pennies. They’re not paying for their returns. They’ve not lost anything.’
