Facebook Scams

TW: LANGUAGE

Dear Facebook, Meta, or whatever name you’re going by now:

Why is it okay for companies, like the one in this post, to use copyrighted images that are not their own to sell inferior products? Why does this not violate your community standards? It should. Why is me saying “Fuck off” worse than me violating copyright in order to scam people out of their hard-earned money? Is it the cut of the money you get that softens you to this sort of shady behavior?

This is Gongxii Mall and their advertisement, which is currently active on Facebook.

Those plushies are super cute, right? And wow, for those prices, a bargain! Unless you happen to have been screwed over by other scam artists operating with immunity on Facebook / Meta’s platform, in which case you might take the time to reverse image search. I did, and I discovered that these pictures were, sadly unsurprisingly, stolen from this Etsy shop.

If you’ve ever been scammed, you understand the anger that bubbled up for me. I went ahead and reported the company. I also reached out to the Etsy store to let them know what was going on.

Meta / Facebook deemed that the advertisement, even though it was clearly using stolen, copyrighted pictures, didn’t violate their community standards. So, I began replying to adoring comments with links to the Etsy store, in the hopes of sparing people from being scammed. My time was probably wasted, and the company went so far as to block me.

Several others in the comment section, already victims of the deception, were kind enough to share the utter crap they’d received. Can you spot the difference?

I posted this in a doll group and spoke to several people who have Etsy stores. The sad truth is that this happens a lot. The general consensus seems to be that the creators hate that their pictures are being stolen and used to scam people, but it happens so frequently, that they’d have to dedicate all of their time to filing copyright claims in order to stop it from happening.

My question is to Facebook / Meta : Why the fuck is this okay with you? Why are you not doing your best to stop scam artists from stealing people’s money? Next time you are sitting around, scratching your balls, wondering why your stock is dropping and why people are leaving your platform: this is part of the reason why. This is shady as fuck.

Shame on you, Meta / Facebook!