With rice prices in Japan still at sky-high levels, some consumers have turned to websites offering discounts as a way to cut costs — only to end up getting scammed.

The Consumer Affairs Agency on Tuesday raised the alarm on the existence of fraudulent websites claiming to sell and deliver discounted rice, warning consumers that they could end up empty-handed.

In a typical case, a consumer who purchases rice from such a website ends up waiting for shipments that never arrive, and attempts to contact the company in charge of the delivery become an exercise in futility.

Last month, a man tried to purchase a bag of rice for ¥3,899 ($27) via an ad on a smartphone app. But when he placed the order, he got a receipt for a pair of sunglasses. Neither the sunglasses nor the rice was delivered to him, the agency said.

In another case, a man in his 20s used his credit card to order two 10-kilogram bags of rice on a website for ¥4,050 — about a quarter of the retail price. But he became suspicious when he didn't receive a confirmation email. When he tried calling the number listed on the website, it was an unused number.

The agency advises consumers to look up the names, addresses and phone numbers of companies that claim to sell rice at unusually low prices to determine their legitimacy before making any purchase.

The average supermarket price of a 5-kg bag of rice rose to a record ¥4,268 in the week starting May 5, more than double what it was at the same time last year.

A week earlier, the average price experienced an ever-so-slight dip of ¥19, which raised a glimmer of hope that the supply chain bottleneck was beginning to show signs of improvement.

The government has been auctioning off rice from its emergency stockpile since March to help bring down prices.

But farm ministry data released Tuesday showed that out of the 210,000 metric tons of rice sold to distributors in the first two rounds of bidding, only 10% had reached the market in the span of a month.

Although around 209,000 tons have been shipped to distributors, only 54,645 tons have made it to wholesalers and 22,303 tons to retailers or restaurants, the data showed.

In the third auction, which took place in late April, around 97% of the rice offered went to the National Federation of Agricultural Co-operative Associations — similar to the results of the two earlier auctions.

This has led some to suggest that the over-concentration of rice at the nation’s biggest distributor could be one of the reasons for the slow circulation of auctioned rice.