Don’t be fooled…
This is Lucinda Bramwell, who for the last forty years has lovingly made these beautiful little houses for mice. Sadly, Lucinda, or Lu, as she prefers to be called, will soon be putting down her tools for the very last time due to family circumstances necessitating the sale of her old, stone workshop.
It’s a very sad and stressful time for Lu and her family, and now her last remaining mouse houses need to find good homes. Can you help?
You may have seen adverts on social media and Google for retiring artisans or craftspeople, who reluctantly need to sell all their remaining stock. These fake, AI-generated photos of older men and women, usually show them standing in front of a workbench, cradling their precious handmade goods in their hands as they lovingly smile for the camera.
Often they have the tools of their trade neatly stacked around them, and they are based in a quaint workshop with a nice view. Of course, it’s all done to make it look completely authentic.
N.B. I used AI to create Lucinda, above, purely so you can see how easy it is to hoodwink people. She looks like a genuinely lovely lady who you’d trust to purchase hand-crafted mouse houses from, doesn’t she?
Unfortunately, the majority of ads you see for retiring crafts people are fake and AI-generated. Keith, Nell, Clem, Reg etc., etc. (insert whatever name you want) all have a sob story designed to reel you in and make you want to buy from them. Prices are heavily discounted, and you have to act swiftly otherwise the products will be gone.
An example of such a website is Back Road Goods (backroad-goods.com). This site has a collection of fake artisans/craftspeople, ranging from ‘Keith’ who makes bee hotels to ‘Bron’ who makes hand-tuned rain drums, and ‘Reg’ with his hedgehog houses. There are others too.
How to spot a fake retiring artisan website
In the case of Back Roads Goods, the domain name backroad-goods.com was only registered on 2nd September 2026, and just for one year. If it was a bona fide site with a track record of selling real artisan goods, it would likely have been registered a long time ago, but even if it was a start-up, it would be registered for more than just for one year.
A short while after the domain name expires on 2nd September 2027, the website will disappear from the web. Undoubtedly, though, it will pop up on a different domain and the whole scam starts all over again.
You can check a .com domain name here: https://who.is/whois/
You can check a UK domain name here:
https://nominet.uk/lookup/
Watch out for domain names that have not long been registered, and only for one year.
Before you buy, always look online for reviews
Never rely on the website’s own reviews, as these can easily be forged. Try Trustpilot, by putting the site’s domain name in a search on there to see what comes back. If it’s a dodgy site, it’s likely someone who has been ripped off will have already left a review. If it’s an okay site it wil hopefully have some genuine, positive reviews.
Check out the Trustpilot reviews for backroad-goods.com. As I write this (17/10/26), there are 228 reviews, all of which are negative, and most are just 1*. People are complaining that Back Roads Goods is a rip off; they either haven’t received the goods or what they’ve been sent is nothing like the photos online, and is actually cheap tat.
The registered office for Ecomcloud Trading LLP, who is the entity behind backroad-goods.com is showing as 32 Kinburn Street, London. Interestingly, this is the same address as that being used for another 418 companies. 419 companies registered to a small, residential property!
The Returns Policy for this website is interesting too because although these retiring artisans are all supposed to be in the UK, you have to send Returns to China. Well, you can just imagine how much that will cost, although the company says it will send you a shipping label if it approves the return! They know nobody is going to bother.
Different names, faces and locations, but the same sort of retirement sob story
These fake retiring artisan adverts are popping up all over the place, with different names, faces, locations, and back stories. Sometimes, you even see the same site, but with a different retiring person!
Often, it will be another domain name they’ve used, but the theme is always the same: someone reluctantly retiring and quickly having to sell their remaining precious stock.
So many people are complaining of being scammed by Back Road Goods and similar con sites, and a lot of money is being lost. The bottom line is, Google should not be showing adverts like this, and nor should social media.
