![]() 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. 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. 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. Most of these sites were created using generic ecommerce templates and many offered visitors a “mystery box”. 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. Hundreds of these scam adverts became active in the last 48 hours.Īnd the Ad Library kept revealing more and more and more. ![]() Dozens of different, but almost identically worded, adverts become active each day.Īn initial search revealed over 5000 matching adverts though this ballooned to over 6000 for a time. Most of these adverts are targeting English speaking users, and the majority were created within the last two months of writing. Other adverts also target other well known brands including Walmart. At one point the number of active adverts surpassed 6,400. 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.Īnd 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’. 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. ![]() 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. "Other carriers (FedEx and UPS) have their own protocols when dealing with undeliverable items.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. "There is no way to tell from the video if all the packages in the store or the purchased packages were handled by the United States Postal Service (USPS)," a spokesperson for USPS told Insider in a statement. The United States Postal Service could not confirm that Treasure Hunt is hawking unclaimed mail, however. According to the USPS website, the MRC will sometimes "auction off the items held" in lots. Mail that can't be delivered or returned gets sent to the USPS Mail Recovery Center. Insider's attempts to reach Hearrin were unsuccessful. She said she obtained a number of Nike and Louis Vuitton products for a steeply discounted price. TikTok user Addison Hearrin filmed herself rifling through a number of unopened packages in the store, ultimately selecting five. In the footage, the store appears to sell unclaimed mail, with numerous packages still bearing intended mail addresses. ![]() But other retailers take it a step further than that.Ī viral TikTok video showcased a store in Evansville, Indiana, with a business model completely centered around the premise of the "treasure hunt." The store is even named Treasure Hunt. That premise is baked into layout strategies for plenty of major companies, including Costco, Target, and TJ Maxx. Modern-day consumers and the cackling, cutlass-swinging pirates of popular folklore have one key trait in common: they both love a treasure hunt. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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