Facebook is doing nothing to stop the scam ads for counterfeit products. On the other hand, the Chinese scammers are improving their game. Today I saw a couple of ads for Oakley and Ray-Ban:
I first took a look at balala.asia, which was registered just a few days ago for 1 year:
As I have stated previously as well, an easy way for Facebook to stop these scammers would be to extra carefully review ads submitted for domains registered during the last few months or so. It’s well-known that the age of a domain is one factor considered by Google in its search algorithm, simply because sites that have been around for a long time are more likely to be trustworthy. Also, when a domain is registered for just 1 year, it is a clear sign that whoever registered the domain does not have much of a long-term perspective.
What makes balala.asia a little more sophisticated is that they’ve added social media links in the footer to make the site seem more legitimate:
However, they have not bothered to actually create these social media pages, but instead point simply to the homepages of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube. It would actually take a bit of effort to create an authentic-looking Facebook page, so they probably did not consider it worth the effort.
In addition, they have added an actual contact form, which looks more professional than the basic email address they provided in the past as contact information. The overall design of the website is also much better. I suspect that the scammers have dramatically improved their conversion ratios with this new design.
kakukaku.asia follows the same template as balala.asia and was registered on the same day.:
It’s simply amazing that Facebook allows Chinese scammers to continue like this.