Hove’s Scarlet Jewelery has been contacted by an ‘AI’ company whistleblower

A jeweler spends hours each week fielding complaints from disgruntled customers of unscrupulous businesses with similar names.

Stevie Holmes, from Hove, runs a legitimate business, Scarlet Jewellers, which experts say has been mistaken for Scarlet Jewels, whose website is filled with AI-generated images.

Holmes said she has heard stories of people who ordered through the Scarlet Jewels website and received substandard items or nothing at all.

Scarlet Jewels has been contacted for comment.

Ms Holmes said she had been receiving “daily calls, web chats and emails” since July from Scarlet Jewels customers who claimed they had “not received” their orders.

It takes “at least an hour a day” to respond.

Ms Holmes told the BBC that if she did not explain that Scarlet Jewelery was a separate business, people would “post on social media and unfairly complain about my business”.

She said, “I have to protect the reputation of my day job so that I don’t get mistaken for this terrible company.”

The small print on the Scarlett Jewels website reveals that it is run by a company called Denimtex Limited and is located in Hong Kong.

But the website claims to be run by an older woman who has created a “last collection” in preparation for “saying goodbye” to her workshop.

Anna Kanhot, professor of digital business management at the University of Sussex, said similar sites are “becoming very popular because they are so easy, so quick and so cheap to create.”

He said AI images are often “too perfect” and unblemished, and while there are flaws, such as “earrings that don’t actually work,” it is a “very common fraud technique” to create a false impression of rarity.

Scarlet Jewels’ website claims that “over 10,000 American women are obsessed with our products” and has 10 five-star reviews.

Professor Canhoto said the images of women the website claims to leave in these reviews were either generated by AI or taken from other sites.

Two-thirds of the reviews left on Trustpilot’s Scarlett Jewels page gave the site one star, with some products labeled as “tatami” or “poor quality.”

Roy Morton, from York, told the BBC he ordered the earrings from a suspicious website, believing them to be from Holmes’s legitimate site.

The 77-year-old claimed he “immediately” knew the website was a “scam” after receiving a delivery notification, even though the product was never delivered.

Olga Grichak, who lives in Luxembourg, said she clicked on a Scarlet Jewels Facebook ad featuring an image of “sophisticated earrings.”

After realizing that the woman on the site was “generated by AI,” she didn’t buy anything.

“I immediately started worrying about people who might be in the same situation as me and buying jewelry,” she said.

The Advertising Standards Authority said it had “already banned several such ads” and issued a public warning about similar misleading ads in September.

After being approached by the BBC, Facebook announced that it had restricted the Scarlet Jewels profile from creating new ads.

Andrew Laughlin, chief researcher at consumer guide magazine Which?, said sites like Scarlet Jewels are “a bit like whack-a-mole”.

He said consumers should look out for slightly off-center AI images or deep discounts as signs of a questionable business, and try to find genuine customer reviews.