Nasty little scammerses:
A report came out a few days ago about a guy who recently lost over $4k in a Facebook scam. If like me, you start to feel superior whenever you hear somebody has been scammed (“That would never happen to me!”), let me give you the details.
The guy in question is Niek Van der Maas, the founder of an adtech company.
Van der Maas saw a Facebook ad that offered $3k of free credit for advertising on Tik Tok. This is a legit program that Van der Maas had read about, so he clicked on the ad, downloaded the required Android app, logged in with his Facebook account, and waited for the $3k credit to land.
Except the credit never did land. Instead, what happened is that Van der Maas’s own Facebook ad account was charged over $4k.
The scammers, who ran the Facebook ad to an imitation version of the Tik Tok ads app, used Van der Maas’s Facebook account info to log into his FB ad account… lock the guy out… and spend $4k on Vietnamese-language ads promoting some kind of aluminum gizmo.
A pretty sophisticated way to make (or lose) $4k. And I’m not 100% sure it would never happen to me.
So I’m telling you this for two reasons:
1) Because the Internet is a dangerous place, and as your surrogate email uncle, I want to make sure you keep yourself safe, and
2) Because marketers and copywriters are always told to “Keep an eye out on what’s working now!” and to throw it in their already-bulging swipe files.
But is an ad working because it’s got good copy with a sexy offer and a well-thought-out back end… or because it’s a scam?
You might think scams are rare. But I’ve read plenty of reports of advertisers scamming customers in various ways, from sneakily putting them on autobill… to cloaked “free but enter your credit card for kicks” offers… to sophisticated scams like the one above.
And when I see crazy ads in Newsmax for ED pills endorsed by President Trump and Tom Selleck… I can easily imagine something shady is going on behind the scenes with those same offers, too.
Likewise, sometimes ads run for weeks and months — and never make any money.
For example, a few years back, I worked with several companies preparing for an ICO — that was the cryptocurrency rage at the time. There was simply so much money in this field that many of these crypto investors were perfectly fine throwing away a few hundred thousand on Facebook ads for different loser projects, hoping to strike gold with one massive success.
So what’s my point? Don’t click on anything. It could be a scam. And just because an ad is running all over the place, that doesn’t meant it deserves a place in your swipe file.
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