Beware of Facebook Advertising

I should have known. I did my due diligence in checking the veracity of the website as best I could. It was super slick, nothing really stood out like poor grammar use, suspicious photos, oddities. A few things did cause concern like where the product was shipping from, customer contact information was lacking except for a weird looking Gmail address. The physical address provide was in the UK, yet, the product was to suppose to ship from California, USA? It's possible in the Internet age. There were a few misspelled words or stilted English use, but....

The product I ordered from Eileenmc.com (they go by many other names now) was a cool garbage can that you can manually compact the trash. The video was slick and the product looked well made. Great concept and doable. I paid my $30 via Paypal.

When the product arrived, I was a bit amused and angry at the same time, you see, what I got from China (not California) was a small, light package of garbage bags that were not strong! Seriously, that is what I got. Yep, leave it to the Chinese to rip Americans and others off with ads that sell fake products.

I investigated the validity of this company and found many others had already been through what I had and a search online showed that the owners of the website were in China, that the UK address on the website, was not there or not their company. It had been copy and pasted to legitimize the site. The products shown, all were rather cool, but fake. There is such garbage can as portrayed by the professionally done video.

Where is Facebook Security?

This one example shows that FB is a whore for money. They do not even check the validity of the website ads or their products. While the website I ordered from is still on FB, selling the same products, the name has changed. This makes me wonder if they are same people scamming because there are many calling out this fraud. Yet, FB does nothing. They could easily verify the advertiser information before promoting it on their platform.

Other Scams

There are other scammers also using a different techniques. One is advertising a product like a kayak or SUP that comes in two or three different sections for easy carrying or storage. Its a great concept because most kayaks are 8-12Ft. long and SUP's are 10 feet. Hard to transport either in a SUV. Having them assemble and disassemble in sections for transport is novel. However, the price cited is like $40 or some very low cost that makes one suspect whether it is real or not. The cheapest kayaks are like $150+.

The scam is that the product has not been made yet. What people are doing are sending a pledge of money (whatever is requested) to show interest in buying the product when it is actually in production, which may never happen. Once X amount of people pledge the asking amount and after it reaches a goal by the maker, then production actually begins. It is like a Kickstarter thing for up and coming businesses or products, but here, there is no intention of ever making it. You might as well consider it a "donation", because it will never be made!

Facebook relies on ads for sure, but these two types of ads are simply fraudulent and FB should be held liable for not vetting them before millions see them.