Fake Carts, Real Cravings: Inside the Dopamine Sites Going Viral From Seoul to Udaipur

On Friday afternoon I ordered a biryani and a plate of chole bhature. The bill came to Rs 1,293. A cartoon dog called Biscuit set off with my order, paused halfway because, the app told me, he had spotted another dog, and was always going to turn up empty-handed. The card on file was imaginary. I was never charged, and being not charged is the entire point.

The site is called FoodNeverComes, and it belongs to a small internet genre that has picked up a name this year - dopamine sites. These are websites that copy the look of a delivery app or an online store almost pixel for pixel, then quietly delete the one step that costs you money. You browse, you fill a cart, you hit checkout, and then you watch a rider inch across a map toward your house. Nothing ever shows up at the door.

If that sounds pointless, that is sort of the joke. But a lot of people are in on it, and a couple of them are Indian.

From a Seoul dorm room to a Udaipur startup

The trend started in South Korea this spring, with a fake delivery site called Food Never Arrives that showed users roughly how much money and how many calories they had saved by not ordering. Copies followed fast. FakeHaul, built by a Microsoft engineer, imitates Temu down to the invented brand names. Damta World recreates an office smoke break, animated cigarette and all.

FoodNeverComes is one of the most talked about, and it was built here. Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, both 26 and from Udaipur, put it together, and the site claims more than 2.7 million visitors since June. They have since added TripNeverLeaves, where you plan a holiday and board a flight that never leaves the runway.

The idea, Parmar says, came from watching his own habits. During a two-month project in Mumbai he was reportedly burning Rs 5,000 to 10,000 a week on food he did not need. "Sometimes you're not hungry at all. You're bored or busy," he told the BBC. Anyone who has opened Swiggy at 11 pm out of sheer restlessness will recognise the feeling.

Why Korea felt it first, and why we will too

Young Koreans are living through a genuinely rough patch. The employment rate for people aged 20 to 24 has slipped, and 378,000 of those aged 15 to 29 are officially "just resting", a polite way of saying not working and not looking. Fake ordering, in that light, is a cheap way to feel something without spending what you do not have.

But the impulse behind it is not Korean at all. Shriram Venkatraman, who studies digital consumption at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, told Rest of World that people everywhere have window-shopped and abandoned online carts for years. What is new, he said, is "the way that behaviour has been formalized into a digital service." In other words, someone finally built a website for the thing you were already doing for free.

That 2.7 million number, gently questioned

Here is where I would slow down before repeating the headline figure. The 2.7 million is the site's own claim, and depending on which report you read, it counts visitors or views, not people who came back. In August, Sharma himself told CBC the site had roughly 92,000 active users over the previous 90 days. Visits, views and active users are three different things, and none of these numbers could be checked from outside. When I opened the homepage, a counter cheerfully announced 30,37,577 "cravings satisfied", with no explanation of what a craving is. Treat the big number as a measure of curiosity, not of a habit.

When I ran a check on SimilarWeb and found 165.4K total visits in September itself. That is telling.

Is your brain actually getting a dopamine hit?

Dopamine gets sold as the brain's pleasure chemical, but the scientists in this story keep correcting that. University of Michigan neuroscientist Kent Berridge told the BBC that "wanting" and "liking" are separate systems, and dopamine is tied to the wanting. Ravi Dhar of the Yale Center for Customer Insights calls the appeal anticipatory utility, the small joy of looking forward to something, though he warns that "we often crash after an event or feel let down."

The study everyone leans on is a 2010 Carnegie Mellon experiment in which people who imagined eating 30 M&M's went on to eat fewer real ones. Two problems. The finding did not replicate cleanly when others tried it. And it tested imagined eating, whereas these sites simulate ordering, which is the wanting stage that comes before any reward. One behavioural economist told Ynet flatly that the "dopamine site" label is "inaccurate". The name, in short, is better marketing than science.

A cure, or a rehearsal for relapse?

The optimistic reading comes from media psychologist Pamela Rutledge, who argues the sites might work as a stand-in for a habit you are trying to quit, while warning the benefit flips into harm if they simply reinforce the compulsion. Stanford's Anna Lembke reportedly told the BBC much the same: repeated use could deepen the very habit the site imitates.

FakeHaul's builder, Jack Yang, ran straight into this. When he asked a subreddit for shopping addicts if he could share his site, they said no, because rehearsing the buying ritual can strengthen the loop people are trying to escape. "The gap between parodying an engagement loop and simply running one is thin," he admitted to Fast Company. He calls his site entertainment, not treatment, and keeps a kill switch handy.

What the checkout looked like on my screen

FoodNeverComes greeted me with a "Namaste" in Hindi, prices in rupees and a photo of butter chicken, so it clearly adjusts to whoever is visiting. The dish cards even carry the little green and red veg and non-veg dots we are used to. The prices ran steep, Rs 620 for the biryani, because the fine print says they are converted from Korean won.

The bill is where it got interesting. It copies an Indian delivery receipt line by line: an item total, a discount, a Rs 186 delivery fee, Rs 53 in taxes, and a green banner congratulating me on the Rs 232 I had "saved". The card on file ended in 4242, which developers will recognise as the standard test-card number.

One detail nagged at me. The homepage promised free delivery with "no catch", and then my bill added a Rs 186 delivery fee anyway. On a real app, showing one price and sneaking in charges at checkout is exactly what our dark pattern rules call drip pricing. A Lightning Deals timer ticking down every 60 seconds is textbook false urgency, another banned trick. And a streak counter informed me a kitten had adopted me, and asked me to come back tomorrow to keep it alive.

No money changed hands, so nobody got cheated. But for a product that sells itself as a way off the ordering treadmill, nudging me to return tomorrow tells you something about which instinct it is really feeding.

The 2 am problem is very much ours

None of this stays abstract in India. Swiggy's food delivery gross order value climbed 22.6 percent to Rs 9,005 crore last quarter. Each order also costs more than it did, with the platform fee that began at Rs 2 in 2023 hiked again in March to Rs 14.90 on Zomato and Rs 17.58 on Swiggy. And the late-night hours are now openly a target, with Swiggy rolling out Late Night Eats for the 10 pm to 5 am crowd. That is the same lonely hour when Kim, the office worker in Seoul, opens his fake app instead of a real one.

So if you want to try one of these sites, go ahead, but treat it as time-pass rather than a fix. FoodNeverComes says it takes no account, uses a fake card and keeps your orders only in your own browser, and I will say plainly that Gizbot has not audited any of that. Never hand one of these sites your real address, phone number or card details. And keep in mind that the evidence they actually stop you spending is, for now, just stories. Yang said it best himself: he does not yet have enough users to know which way it cuts.