A search of Facebook’s Ad Library reveals the alarming extent to which cyber crooks exploit Facebook’s Sponsored Ads platform to proliferate their scams.
We’ve previously reported on the “unclaimed Amazon packages” scams that have been using Facebook Sponsored Ads to appear on the newsfeeds of Facebook users.
These scam adverts claim to offer products that customers have previously returned to Amazon and are now, according to the adverts, being resold at heavily discounted prices by third parties. See below for an example.
However, these adverts have nothing to do with Amazon and are directing Facebook users to countless brand new web domains that appear to be operating out of China (based on their registrar data.) Such types of websites are likely to be involved with identity theft or may send out counterfeit goods or even nothing at all and will simply pocket the victim’s money.
And to offer some insight into the scale of the problem, we searched through Facebook’s public Ad Library – which shows exactly what adverts are currently being distributed to user’s newsfeeds – to reveal that at the time of writing there are over 5000 different adverts trying to lure Facebook users to websites falsely claiming to sell ‘unclaimed Amazon packages’. At one point the number of active adverts surpassed 6,400. Other adverts also target other well known brands including Walmart.
Most of these adverts are targeting English speaking users, and the majority were created within the last two months of writing. Dozens of different, but almost identically worded, adverts become active each day.
An initial search revealed over 5000 matching adverts though this ballooned to over 6000 for a time.
Hundreds of these scam adverts became active in the last 48 hours.
And the Ad Library kept revealing more and more and more..
The adverts will direct users to countless web domains that, according to their public information, were only registered days, weeks or, at most, a handful of months ago. Most of these sites were created using generic ecommerce templates and many offered visitors a “mystery box”.
Yet despite the similarities of these scam adverts and their longevity on the social media site, Facebook is clearly struggling to remove them from their sponsored ads platform.
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The sheer volume of adverts suggests these sites are operated by an organised network of criminals capable of maintaining thousands of Facebook ads and web domains.
It comes after a study by UK based consumer affairs watching Which? noted that Facebook failed to remove 26% of fraudulent adverts after users reported them. Facebook has also recently been the subject of a lawsuit brought by UK finances guru Martin Lewis after a slew of fake get-rich-quick adverts spread across Facebook using his name and identity.
Despite these adverts being reported by users and subsequently removed by Facebook, another near identical advert always seems to pop-up right in its place, demonstrating that Facebook does not appear to have an effective method to detect and filter out these scams or the crooks behind them.
Facebook has been heavily criticized for their often sluggish and reactive approach to removing scam adverts, especially since the social media goliath turns a profit as a result of these scams (since the scammers pay Facebook to have their adverts appear on Facebook’s Sponsored Ads platform.)
And it’s likely that these “unclaimed packages” scams represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the total number of fake ads being distributed to newsfeeds that ultimately attempt to lure Facebook users to counterfeit retail websites.
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While Amazon do have a number of returned packages sent back to their warehouses for various reasons, Amazon deal with these returns themselves. They don’t hire out third party companies to sell them, let alone sell them at heavily discounted prices. If you see any advert or site claiming to be selling unclaimed Amazon packages, it’s most likely going to be a scam.
Also watch out for similar scams that replace Amazon with Walmart or other well known ecommerce brands.
Hat-tip: Iain McAusland for pointing us to the Facebook Ad Library.