If you’ve been on Facebook lately you’ve probably seen sponsored posts advertising incredibly large, but portable solid state drives (SSDs) for sale.
Oddly, these ads don’t mention a ridiculously low price as most fraudulent Facebook ads do. They simply say the drives are 50% off.
I guess they figure that “savings” plus the fact that the drive has an enormous amount of storage will be enough to draw people in.
One of these fraudulent ads landed in my Facebook Newsfeed just this morning. Here’s a screenshot:
Looks rather enticing, right? Well, there are several clues that this ad is fraudulent, including the following:
1 – Misspelled words (Moblle instead of Mobile and Firday instead of Friday). Legitimate businesses go to great pains to ensure that their ads are error-free.
2 – While 8TB M.2 drives do exist, you’re not going to find one for sale on Facebook (or anywhere else) at a realistically affordable price (when compared to smaller drives).
3 – If you hover your mouse over the “Communications for Your Business” link at the top of the ad you will see this:
As you can see, this page only has 120 followers, indicating that it was just recently created. Any established business selling 8TB SSDs would likely have several thousand followers on Facebook at a minimum.
Bottom line: These fly-by-night Facebook pages and fraudulent ads are quickly created, used to defraud as many “customers” as possible in a short amount of time, and then taken offline (either by the scammer or by Facebook) as soon as all the complaints start rolling in.
As a general rule, it’s wise to consider every “Sponsored” post that lands in your Facebook Newsfeed to be fraudulent unless and until it has been proven to be legitimate.