Earlier this year, Dupe.com sprung up with viral ferocity, promising online shoppers a hack that would save them thousands on furniture. Now the startup is being sued by Williams-Sonoma in a suit that alleges false advertising, unfair competition and copyright infringement.

A little background: Dupe.com traces its origin to Carrot, an online shopping platform founded in 2021 by entrepreneurs Bobby Ghoshal and Ramin Bozorgzadeh. It was originally conceived as a deal-hunting browser extension, but Ghoshal and Bozorgzadeh came to realize that customers were gravitating toward a tool that identifies look-alike products and pivoted the business to capitalize on that trend.

The resulting site is a cleverly product-ized variation on a Google Lens search. Users input a product URL and Dupe.com returns shoppable options, tiered by price. A recent search for an Eames lounger (retail price: $5,795) returned look-alike results as cheap as $800 from Wayfair. According to a story on Today, Dupe.com makes a commission on sales.

In an interview earlier this year with Business of Home, Ghoshal said the site was sometimes being used as a “reverse” dupe engine—a tool for customers looking to work backward from a cheap copy to the genuine article. However, the site is marketed—mostly through videos on TikTok and Instagram—primarily as a way to save money by hunting for knockoffs.

Dupe.com’s social marketing blitz also centered around the concept of avoiding furniture pricing “scams,” or the idea that different retailers were selling the same piece at wildly different prices. In many posts, Ghoshal himself talks about “falling for” furniture pricing scams over videos of Dupe.com being used on pieces from retailers like Arhaus, McGee & Co., and Pottery Barn.

Enter Williams-Sonoma. On August 30, the San Francisco–based retail giant—which also has been under fire for false advertising, facing three such lawsuits this year—filed suit in federal court, detailing a list of complaints against Dupe.com. The thrust of the filing is that, across dozens of videos, Dupe.com made numerous false claims against Williams-Sonoma brands, while also using its copyrighted images without permission.

For example, in a video the lawsuit says was posted to Instagram on April 20, Dupe.com allegedly claimed that West Elm was selling a chair for more than $2,000, while “the same” chair was available for 80 to 90 percent less at other sites (the video has been taken down). Williams-Sonoma says that the chair “actually costs half that amount and is exclusively manufactured for and sold by [Williams-Sonoma].”

In other since-removed videos, Dupe.com allegedly accuses Pottery Barn of being “pretty guilty” of “buying their products from the same few factories, [calling] them different names [and pricing] them differently … almost all the time.” The lawsuit, meanwhile, counters that Williams-Sonoma designs and manufactures “the vast majority” of its products in-house, and that they’re exclusively sold through its owned brands.

In essence, the retail giant is accusing Dupe.com of crossing several ethical and legal lines in an effort to go viral by “manufacturing outrage” among consumers. The lawsuit asks the court to force the site to cease using Williams-Sonoma’s images and refrain from “engaging in any acts and practices that deceive the public and/or the trade,” as well as demanding unspecified damages and attorneys’ fees. Dupe.com has not yet filed a response to the suit. Ghoshal declined to comment for this article, and Williams-Sonoma did not respond to a request for comment.