Websites and adverts peddling too-good-to-be-true deals are popular at this time of the year; the below article details all the red flags we used to confirm an advert that appeared on Facebook promoting a desktop monitor deal was totally fake.
We all want a great deal this Christmas, meaning this time of the year is the perfect time for crooks to try and scam online shoppers with scams designed to entice victims with what look like great prices.
One such advert caught our attention that appeared as a Sponsored Advert on Facebook promoting a widescreen monitor as a really low price. While you may think that Sponsored Adverts on Facebook would have been vetted in some way by the social network, sadly that’s not the case, and despite Facebook’s on-going string of security related mishaps and subsequent apologies, they’re still pretty terrible at weeding out scams on their platform (also refer to article last week!)
The advert was promoting a 35 inch curved gaming monitor for only $69, which anyone familiar with such products will tell you is an exceptionally low price since most of those products generally sell for many hundreds of dollars. And there we have our first big red flag.
If it appears too good to be true, it probably is.
Clicking on the link leads to the website BTMD.online. We did a WHOIS search for that website (on WHOIS.net) which gives certain details about the web domain. It revealed the website was only two days old. That’s red flag number two.
Scam websites are often very new without much history.
The site, below, was full of offers, all of which were priced at around the 70%-85% discount mark (refer to red flag number one.)
The site was poorly designed, instead just packed with images and prices. Two Contact links appeared at the bottom. The logo was blurred. The website lacked branding. Many of the links didn’t work and many of the paragraphs had poor grammar. Red flag number three.
Scam websites are frequently poorly designed, often use simple templates and often contain design errors.
We went to the About Us information link at the bottom. The address listed an address in Lewisham, London. We copied that address into Google to check if it was legitimate, and no such company called BTMD (or similar) was listed. In fact another Google result showed that a number of other fake websites were also using the same phone number and address, including a fake website called quick-mall.com. Red flag number four.
Scam websites will not list any contact information, or use fake contact information that does not belong to them.
In this case, a Google search of the address was enough to reveal this.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
That’s enough to dismiss the website, but if we head back in time to the advert we first saw on Facebook, we also took a look at the Facebook page that posted the advert, a page called The we mall.
The Facebook page had only made 4 posts, all links leading to their website. Scrolling down the short timeline shows the page was only created on September 13th 2018, a few months ago. Red flag number five.
Facebook pages peddling these scams are often new and haven’t made a great deal of posts.
So if we look at what we discovered, we have a new Facebook page promoting links to a poorly designed website that’s only a few days old using fake contact information trying to lure visitors into purchasing items at too-good-to-be-true prices.
In light of that information, we can be 100% confident that what we have here is a scam, and yet another example of scammers running amok on Facebook’s Sponsored Ads platform.