Poked around on vincerewears.com to see what was there.<p>There's a widget that pops up periodically that says <i>"Someone in {city}, {country} purchased {product}"</i>. It looked a bit fishy, so I poked around the source code.<p>Sure enough, the faked purchases are in the source code. They don't even bother to load them via XHR to at least give some semblance of legitimacy. Lol.<p>s = [{
"sn_city": "Pompano Beach",
"sn_country": "United States",
"sn_discount": null,
"sn_first_name": "Erick",
"sn_handle": "natu-t-shirt",
"sn_img": "https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0283\/5824\/6448\/products\/product-image-1183227221.jpg?v=1600916205",
...<p>From: <a href="https://sales-notification-cdn.makeprosimp.com/v1/published/21209/a04b44b9edb142a4b9fa39692cb95d43/13615/app.js?v=1&shop=vincerestreetwear.myshopify.com" rel="nofollow">https://sales-notification-cdn.makeprosimp.com/v1/published/...</a>
"Thousands of fake Instagram accounts are powering scams targeting influencers. The scams are run by different people, but are the bots?"
I'm trying to figure out what part of this story is the scam.<p>Shopify's business model encourages people to build dropshipping sites, there are literally hundreds of thousands of them. They promote plugins like Oberlo[1] that let you import products directly from AliExpress into your store to markup and dropship. They have blog posts[2] that teach you how to dropship. I feel like the author is implying that dropshipping is a scam, well if you are foolish enough to pay markup on items that you could order yourself directly from AliExpress that's your own problem.<p>I think the bot issue is highlighting that these "scammers" have figured out a way to automate driving sales through influencer marketing. However, any dropshipper could do the same thing manually, and some likely are. Influencer marketing is basically sending influencers your products to promote, in this case they are asking them to purchase, but they are still getting real products. Is that a scam?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.shopify.com/oberlo" rel="nofollow">https://www.shopify.com/oberlo</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-start-dropshipping" rel="nofollow">https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-start-dropshipping</a>
The author's Github for this article is pretty cool:<p><a href="https://github.com/mbellotti/instagram_ambassador_scams" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mbellotti/instagram_ambassador_scams</a>
You have a similar thing happening with Enchroma-glasses for colorblind. Tons of often somewhat professionally made, heartwarming videos about friends or students buying "expensive glasses" (not that expensive) to someone so they "finally can see colors" (usually without actually saying it directly). And they always go viral with tons of suspiciously similar comments flooding them. All comments about how they actually work, and why they don't work as portrayed are buried by very aggressive comments.
On fireforx, at least, there is a 1 second lag between pressing down on medium and the page scrolling down, probably because of bad js. Deactivating js paywalls you, though, so no way around it.
Looks like GoDaddy is providing the domain name for a lot of these fronts. Someone could cause an awful lot of ruckus by emailing abuse@godaddy.com with a list of the offending sites (Urban Ice, Hype Authority and Brute Impact are still online: you can find the links in the article).<p>Just food for thought.