Scammers never miss an opportunity to make a quick buck, and love to piggy back on the latest trends. So what better way to kick off the scamming season than by offering Black Friday sales on one of the most popular products around: a Stanley cup.
We found an ad on Facebook offering a Stanley Quencher for the low price of $19:
Facebook ad for Stanley Quenchers
Normally these Stanley cups sell for $45 on Amazon. They’re very popular since they reportedly keep drinks cold for 11 hours and hot for seven hours. Even if your car burns out.
Clicking the advertisement takes you to a shady-at-best website where you can take your pick of Stanleys.
Website at domain d-sportinggoodsus[.]com
Hint: look at the domain name. Malwarebytes doesn’t like it either.
Malwarebytes customers are protected
Both the site and the payment processor are registered in Hong Kong and will happily pocket your money without doing anything in return.
To gain the buyer’s trust, the Facebook comments are populated by bots and/or compromised accounts.
Facebook comments of people claiming they received the goods
As always, use your best spidey senses to pick up on scams like these. With this particular scam, you’re likely to only lose the money you paid to the scammers, but other scams can end in much higher losses.
How do you avoid bad ads?
- You probably have the URL you need. It’s sometimes easier to search a brand name than put in the full URL, but if you go directly there you won’t get caught by any bad ads lurking in your search results.
- Careful searching. If you do need to go looking, cross reference the URLs you see in search engines with a search of your own. If it’s legitimate, you should see a large number of people and businesses referencing it.
- Report bad ads. If a sponsored ad is up to no good, there should be a way to report from the search engine or social media platform in which you found it. You’re doing your part to help the next person who coes along to stay safe!
- The thorny blocking issue. If you choose to block ads, be aware that the way you block may break functionality of the site you’re on. Some sites will insist you turn off your ad blocker. Others may simply not work anymore if you use script blocking or turn off JavaScript. It’s not so much a case of “job done”, as it is “job just getting started”.
- Remember, if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t true, and could mean someone is trying to trick you into paying for something you’re never going to get.
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