Criminals cloning South African online shops, promoting them on Facebook, and stealing people's money

Jan

Jan

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Facebook helping criminals use cloned South African online shops to steal people's money

Scammers are creating exact clones of South African online shopping websites, advertising their scam sites on Facebook using great deals as bait, and taking payment for orders but never shipping the products.

Local ladies fashion retailer Desray recently had such an incident, but they aren’t the only online store that scammers have cloned to steal people’s money.
 
Unfortunately Facebook can't deal with fraud affectively and in a timely manner. They are very **affective at blocking the wrong accounts though, and then of course impossible to get any kind of support. Be careful to use Facebook as the main communication tool for your business, especially small businesses.

**refer to grammar nazi below.
 
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Banks been dealing with this for yonks.
 
RedViking said:
Unfortunately Facebook can't deal with fraud affectively and in a timely manner. They are very **affective at blocking the wrong accounts though, and then of course impossible to get any kind of support. Be careful to use Facebook as the main communication tool for your business, especially small businesses.

**refer to grammar nazi below.
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That headline will get you guys sued.
 
Standard pathetic response from FB if you report the spam site
 

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Jan said:
I doubt it. We asked them for comment over a week ago, and they haven't responded.

But it would certainly be an upgrade from the total indifference we're getting right now.
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If lawyers pull up just say it was a typo, lol

If they don't respond make next article `Facebook/Meta employees busted in illegal mining ring'
 
It's a pity marketing of any kind is the core around which social media was built. If a multimedia medium is geared for marketing one thing, then you can market anything else too. Anything. However good or bad.

At the scale of social media today, about the only way to prevent deleterious activity is AI powered censorship. Truly. Nothing else could come close to keeping all activity in line effectively. So the real questions are: Is AI powered censorship a good thing or a bad thing? And in the case of there being credible reasoning for it being a good thing - Who do you trust to train the models?

To be clear I don't have the answers. But I'm convinced that in the event that satisfactory, actionable answers can't be found - It would be better, on balance, if marketing driven social media didn't exist.
 
RedViking said:
Unfortunately Facebook can't deal with fraud affectively and in a timely manner. They are very **affective at blocking the wrong accounts though, and then of course impossible to get any kind of support. Be careful to use Facebook as the main communication tool for your business, especially small businesses.

**refer to grammar nazi below.
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Yip. Had to pay a local marketing agency R5k+VAT to get a Facebook page (of a brand I own) transferred to me.

Tried FB directly for months but all I got was crickets.
 
Quicks said:
Example?
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Phishing scammers have been setting up fake banking websites like crazy over the past 20-30 years. In the beginning, Social Media platforms were not big, so they would send out hundreds of millions of e-Mails hoping to reach a client and have them click on the link in the email and log into the fake website, which will give scammers the username and password and they could then log into the clients' bank account and wipe it out. Back in those times, there were no 2FAs or other security measures like there is today. South African banks were cloned like crazy.
 
Nothing new. Been going on for years. There will always be scammers and people will always fall for cheap/too good to be true deals.
 
BlackStatic said:
That headline will get you guys sued.
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I very much doubt it when even their own platform is used to warn about abuse on their platform, with some juicy class actions against FB in the group.

What we see in the article is by no means new.

Screenshot_3.jpg

Just don't spoof Facebook though:
domainnamewire.com

Meta Platforms drops lawsuit against Namecheap after settlement - Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News

Judge formally dismisses lawsuit with prejudice. Meta Platforms’ (NASDAQ: FB) lawsuit against domain name registrar Namecheap was officially dismissed today, following a settlement last month. Meta (Facebook at the time) sued (pdf) Namecheap and its Whois privacy service in March 2020 for...
domainnamewire.com domainnamewire.com
 
rvZA said:
Banks been dealing with this for yonks.
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True, but usually one page, vs an entire site. Nothing stopping criminals from cloning an entire bank site though (except for RoI reasons).


Scam sites have been around for years now. Mostly in the solar area, with too good to be true pricing, but has spread to others.
Harder and harder to tell a legitimate site these days.

You need to check registration dates for the site, look at phone numbers to see if used elsewhere, check site text make sure it looks reasonably meaningful etc, and make sure the images are not generic / taken from elsewhere.
 
Facebook is a load of crap. I only really use it for a few groups I am on and marketplace. I am constantly reporting fake scam sites like the one described in the article. One recently for a workshop tool box for a few hundred rand but looking at other sites it goes for around R20K. The shopping cart button is the only functionality of the web page. but as usual even though reported as a scam Facebook sends an update that they have not removed the ad. Fuccum and fucc Mark Fukkerberg
 
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