A user from r/scams messaged me to share my story with this group cos of the examples I had attached in my post. After reading what this sub about and relating it to my real world experience of how some women are just petty children with no higher moral purpose than just immediate material gratification at the expense of others, I decided to share this with you:

Until yesterday night, I worked as a digital talent and brand co-ordinator with 6 companies till date. My job basically goes like this:

  • Talk to brands looking to market their online, direct-to-customer (D2C) business (basically overpriced goods manufactured for dirt cheap price in China).
  • Evaluate influencers from IG and FB who can market any products and pitch these influencers to the brands
  • Once approved, follow up with the influencer to create a post, featuring a product from the brand.
  • Pay influencers for the post via the brand and make a commission in between.

Basically doing this on repeat for a few years drained my conscious and my soul because I was enabling both the brands and influencers to fool you, the consumers through lying, deceit and fraud.

Today, it's extremely easy to start a business. Basically anyone can connect with a manufacturer in China to source the products (see Away Luggage) and create an online e-commerce store via Shopify or Big Commerce to sell the products. Now all these newly minted brands need a marketing medium to put their products in front of you and now comes the "influencers".

In my experience, around 95% of influencers have built a following of mostly gullible people through photoshopped body images, paid likes, and a mostly fake lifestyle that people aspire to. So naturally, these brands with extremely overpriced products want to capitalise on these gullible followers, so, they pay the influencers to create a post featuring their products and naturally these shallow, self-obsessed influencers do it. They don't care about the the quality of the product, the usefulness of it, nor have they ever used the product. For example, a fitness influencer might post something like "I love this vegan protein shake powder" and immediately people who follow her buy it hoping to look like the photoshopped version of the influencer which is likely never possible.

The only ones to win here are the brands and the influencers. The consumers are always left with an overpriced, and sometimes utterly useless product. While all this happens, the brands and their new CEO's pride themselves of the profits they made this quarter on Twitter and the influencers better their lifestyle with the money and post about it making you feel miserable.

Please save yourself and your friends and family from these monsters. Buy stuff you need and buy stuff after someone you know pledges about the quality of it. Go with trusted brands. Dont fall for ads, especially ads from influencers. You have worked hard for that money. Spend it wisely. Buy stuff that you truly need and buy stuff that gives you real value and actually makes you feel good.

Here are few examples of how these posts looks like. They seem very authentic, but underneath they are your typical slimy scamy car salesmen

  1. https://imgur.com/a/7RwPUTq
  2. https://imgur.com/JkpBpAw
  3. https://imgur.com/a/Ec3rtNv