140 "ghost" stores operating online in Australia mistakenly market themselves as local brands and sell everything from bad clothing to fake sports labels, or at all.

Affected customers told Guardian Australia that if the products they actually arrive from these sites have a "junk" quality and it is nearly impossible to organize a refund.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is investigating complaints about ghost stores, but experts say Shopify and Meta are responsible for enabling these sites and allowing them to run false advertising.

With the assistance of consumer experts, Australia's Guardian Australia tracked 140 online ghost stores, all of which pretend to be local businesses and are often accompanied by a fictional story that tells consumers that they are closing and must get rid of stocks.

Analysis shows that the number of misleading locations and the number of threats to Australian consumers is much more common than previously known.

On March 31, The Guardian Australia purchased a top from a website called Maison Canberra for $69.95, which has since been removed. The store sent an email on April 1 saying the item had been shipped but had never been delivered.

Experts say these sites should comply with Australian consumption laws because they advertise on local social media, but it is difficult to perform any violations because the exact location of the owner can be difficult to identify.

Many websites use very similar copies, sell similar products, and reuse email addresses. For example, a website reviewed by the Guardian Australia, under its name "Sydney", lists contact emails for another website, named "Dublin".

Last November, an online store claimed on its Facebook page: "After only owning brick-and-mortar stores for years in the heart of Melbourne, we decided to open our online store!".

However, it says on its website that it is "located in Lennik, Belgium." It lists a home address 30 minutes from Brussels, but also says: "Some of our products are found and shipped from Australia, while others are shipped from China".

Another online store claims on its website “based on the heart of Melbourne”. But it lists two addresses, one for an office building in central Amsterdam and the other for a townhouse about 20 kilometers away.

The return form of the third website instructs the customer to pay the return postage to address it on the China Huijiang address. The same address is listed on five other websites - one is used with the name "Australia" and the other is used with "London".

On third-party review websites, customers claim they have been instructed to send a return to the same Thousand River address after purchasing the product from a website claimed to be located in Norway, Canada, Germany and New Zealand.

A 60-year-old Brisbane woman, who asked not to be named, said she spent about $350 on shoes and clothes on the site last year after seeing ads on Facebook. She said she received the items, but they were "trash".

After trying to arrange a refund, she contacted PayPal and the credit card provider.

The woman said the company sent PayPal details of the refund process, which listed the address of Zhejiang and directed her to issue a false custom statement, stating that the goods were worth less than $5.

"Everything above $5 will be destroyed immediately, resulting in no refund," the form said.

The client said she was “usually a very tenacious person” but “after four months of backward and forward arguments, I think I just cut my losses because it causes a lot of anxiety”. She has not received a refund yet.

Most of the identified ghost stores have been built using the Shopify e-commerce platform - based on analysis by the Guardian Australia, evidence from customers, and a running list of websites compiled by the scam alerts Australia's Facebook Group.

Erin Turner, CEO of the Center for Consumer Policy Research, said online platforms must do more to prevent “fraudulent players” from using their services.

“These ghost stores pay for advertising and support, and platforms like Shopify and Instagram are making money,” she said.

"We should call it: digital retail fraud. Without coordinated actions from digital platforms and regulators, these fraudsters will continue to play."

The Guardian Australia contacted Meta and Shopify for comment, but the companies did not respond by the deadline.

Digital marketing strategist Briony Cullin said she has seen an increase in social media ads in such online stores over the past six months. She has reported 13 advertisements for different businesses to Meta. Every time, she said she had been notified that the ad would not be deleted.

One of the "support" messages Cullin received from Meta, seen by Guardian Australia, said the company used a "combination of technology and human reviewers" to process reports.

"The consumers here need to maintain a certain balance," Kulin said. "They are not responsible, and that's a huge problem."

Maison Canberra and other stores mentioned in this article have been contacted for comment.