I almost fell for it. I really almost did.
I love-love-love the OOFOS sandal/flip-flop thing-y. It / they have changed my world for the better. Profoundly. I went from owning one pair to owning many, very quickly.
I have them everywhere: in my clothes closet, in the basement by the gardening tools, in my car (if I need a quick change into comfortable shoes), in my office, downstairs in the rec room by the door if I need to slip on a pair of shoes real quick. Et cetera.
So imagine my delight when I saw an ad on Instagram for Oofos on sale. Great colors. Great prices. But as I continued adding items to my shopping cart, I started to get suspicious.
Why are they listing the original price at $118 when it’s really $55?
Why does the type on this page get weird and look like bad web design?
Why is there a typo in a headline?
Why are they so cheap?
And then the pieces added up in my mind, and I knew it was a scam site — the kind where you buy an item but never get it, where there is no customer service number to follow up and get a refund, or where you get a sub-par, knock-off product, if you’re even that “lucky.”
I reported that ad as a scam to Instagram. And I notified the company. (They’re aware, working on it, etc.)
But IG, FB, Twitter and all these other services and sites that are ad-revenue dependent care not a hoot for bogus-scam ads, and the harm they cause consumers. They care for the revenue stream.
Case in point — Facebook ads for USPS stamps on sale. (I almost fell for that one, too.) Those ads were on FB for many, many months.
They were a scam.
Many people reported the scam.
I’m hoping/figuring the USPS reported the scam, too.
And the ads kept running and running, catching people unaware *and* robbing the USPS of (fill in the blank) large numbers of dollars.
But, yeah, let’s smash the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
***
PSA (from me)
Take the time to report scams.
Scam social media accounts.
Scam ads.
All the scam.
Scam, scam, scam. Make it scram.
