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It’s well-known that there are several organized scam rings operating from China that seem to be solely in the business of duping customers through fake online stores. We have written extensively about humongous networks of online stores such as Uniqueness and ChicV Ltd. that have terrible customer reviews across the board.
If they aren’t outright scams such as sites that never deliver the products or steal credit card details, they may bait-and-switch customers using misleading ads on social media.
A big part of these misleading ads are images stolen from legitimate companies and artists, including one-of-a-kind creations costing hundreds of dollars that aren’t even for sale any longer. Artists are badly hit by these scams as many confused customers think that they were duped by the original artist, not realizing that they purchased from a website operated by a Chinese scam ring.
These scams are thriving as there is little to no recourse for the artists whose intellectual property is being stolen. Internet companies shirk responsibility as they have no legal obligation or financial incentive to help in taking down these scams. Law enforcement is of no help too as these scams are carried out internationally.
Even taking down a single website requires extensive documentation and repeated back-and-forth with multiple parties involved. In the end, it barely even matters as the Chinese scam rings quickly replace the deleted websites with new ones.
Even though we know that e-commerce scams may be run by multi-billion dollar Chinese corporations, there is almost no information available about how these companies operate on a daily basis. However, we recently got a rare insight into these scams by a Chinese scammer himself.
A post popped up recently in the Facebook group ‘Facebook Ad Scambusters!’ which is dedicated to exposing scam Facebook ads. It was made by an artist who we shall call the ‘Saw Lady’. She makes art out of vintage saws and Chinese scammers discovered that her work is the perfect Father's Day scam. Images of her creations were taken without permission and plastered all over ads on Facebook.
A ‘Scammer Boy’ from China had the bright idea to reach out to ‘Saw Lady’ to ask for more of her original images. In trying to win her trust, he told her some interesting things no scammer has revealed before.
He works in Nanchang in a brand new ‘office’. There are 100 of them young ‘boys’, around 24 years old, in this ‘company’ office. There are many companies as part of the scam ring. This one is considered ‘advertising’ and made $10 million last year.
The ‘boys' are responsible for finding products (ie. stealing images and content) to use for limited runs such as for holidays like Father's Day. They care about money more than anything and are psychologically conditioned via training to hate Americans.
The ‘boys’ source the product. Then the factories make a limited run of a cheap copy, and ship it to the bait-and-switch victims. It's a game of who can sell the most scam items.
The offices are set up as a common workspace to encourage competition. ‘Scammer Boy’ was jealous of the guy sitting next to him, who had sold 3,000 of the scam saws in the past two weeks, mostly to Californians.
Each 'employee' has 8 Facebook pages, 3 ecommerce stores and 10 Facebook
ad accounts at any given time. They develop their own scams and then share. Each 'kid' picks their products to promote, runs the pages, stores and ads. If something isn't selling, they focus instead on what is. They aren't really given an ad budget, but can't lose money in the end.
He told the ‘Saw Lady’ he contacted her since she managed to get two of his ads pulled, with 10,000 views each - and was quite upset. She was the topic of the 'lunch table'.
A few victims have received their bait-and-switch items. The Chinese product is a miniature copy about 8” with a 'wooden' handle and not a 24” to 28” vintage saw like the originals. They copied her photos and content including her logo and warnings about authenticity.
Not surprisingly, it is unnerving for the victim to see photos of herself and posts she wrote in her voice (first person) being plagiarized on the scam sites in their entirety.
There has been so much aggravation and devastation to her and her small business. Sadly, it won't be over when the Father's Day scam ads end. When the bait-and-switch items arrive from China, duped and angry victims will search for these since-closed scam Facebook pages and ecommerce stores. Confused, some will likely find her site and blame her, hurting her reputation - though she is a victim too in all this.
There is a silver lining to this ordeal. She's sold more saws in the past two weeks than she did in all of 2017. She got 500 orders - more than she did before Christmas. So many
orders in fact that Etsy has removed her store from search until she gets caught up. Some people ARE doing due diligence and looking up the source of this art when they see the ad. The number pales in comparison, however, to those falling for the scam.
