After 40 years, an elderly couple have decided to retire and close their business. Or a clothes retailer says that it is with sadness he has decided to shut up shop and needs to get rid of his remaining stock.
But the “sadness” of a business closing also brings an opportunity to bag a bargain – perhaps a cut-price leather jacket, or 50% off the last merino wool sweaters in the warehouse.
Such ads are commonplace on social media, but, in some cases, they are simple scams where you hand over money only to receive nothing.
Or perhaps you will end up with a jacket or sweater that barely resembles what was advertised, or is of a much lower quality than expected.
Marta Mallavibarrena, a cybersecurity researcher based in Madrid, was browsing Instagram when she saw four different shops all using the same language (“Sadly, we are closing …”) about a sale. Some were offering men’s jackets, while others were selling animal print clothing.
When she searched the ad library of Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram), she found 50,000 ads had used the same phrase, and 1,600 were still active at the time. Most of the accounts which published the ads had been around for a short time, and those that were older had typically changed their profile names in recent weeks.
Using similar marketing tactics is not a crime, says Mallavibarrena. But often real images from reputable shops were being taken and used across the “closing down” ads.
In cases where buyers actually get something delivered, the products will often come from large, cheap online retailers or so-called “drop shipping” sites: third party companies which ship products directly to consumers.
“While you might get something delivered, it’s not going to be reflective of what’s there on the ad,” says Mallavibarrena. “It’s going to be something like a polyester T-shirt with the knitting pattern printed on it, instead of an actual knitted sweater.”
Serpil Hall, a consultant on fraud and economic crime, says hundreds of such accounts can be set up at once using emotive language with a sense of urgency to draw people in.
“In many cases no goods are ever shipped – the site disappears after collecting payments. In some other cases, counterfeit, or poor-quality goods arrive (sweatshirts, watches, trainers), often traced to very low-cost bulk suppliers,” she says. The accounts will often be abandoned, or renamed, once negative reviews start to build up on them.
What the scam looks like
The post will say that a company is closing down and has a limited amount of stock available. This tactic uses the scarcity principle, which says that people place a higher value on things which are limited in availability.
Sometimes there will be bigger discounts if you buy more than one item – for example, 20% off one and 40% off for two.
Often the accounts that post the ads will look slick and – when glanced at very quickly – genuine. They may give an address, and sometimes have the city they claim to be based in as part of the name – such as London or St Louis. In reality, these formats can be endlessly repeated with false information and have no grounding in reality. Often the pictures that appear on them – of the founders, say – can be AI-generated.
In one case highlighted by consumer group Which?, a boutique called Thompson Oxford said it had a “heavy heart and tears in my eyes” and could not compete with larger stores, so it had to close down and sell on its stock.
Hall says that often the sites are not sophisticated. “They’re industrialised social engineering – leveraging cheap ads, fake urgency and rapid rebranding to take money from thousands of consumers before disappearing.”
What to do
The age-old adage says that “if it is too good to be true, then it probably is”. And this is the case here. The fraudsters rely on people reacting quickly when faced with the offer of a bargain.
So take a step back and immediately question whether the ad you are looking at could be a scam.
Start with the comments on the profile page of the account which will give you an indication of whether people got the goods they ordered, and what the quality was like.
You can check Meta’s ad library to see whether the text from the ad is replicated elsewhere. Doing a reverse image search, on Google Images for example, will allow you to see where else the pictures may be appearing.
You can complain to Meta about misleading contents, or a possible scam on its platforms. Its rules say that ads “must not promote products, services, schemes or offers using identified deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to scam people out of money or personal information”.
