Why Facebook is allowing fake and scam shops to run ads?

Abhishek Prakash
2 min readJun 19, 2016

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I have been noticing lots of ads on Facebook where recently created Facebook pages are selling T-shirts.

There were ads from a recently created Game of Thrones page selling GoT quoted T-shirt, there are persistent ads from some ‘Linux pages’ that do nothing but sell quotes t-shirt on third party stores.

Until now this was bearable. But then I saw a strange ad today.

It was from the reputed clothing brand Ralph Lauren. As per the ad, Ralph Lauren France was selling its Polo t-shirts at 90% discount.

I was intrigued so I checked the page. Apparently, the page was created 3 days back and had less than 50 likes.

Most interesting thing is that it was listed as non-profit organization (and selling things at the same time).

I clicked on the Shop Now button to check where does it go. The link pointed to ralphlauren[dot]ga domain which had a e-commerce front end.

I googled for Ralph Lauren France and found that they have an existing website called ralphlauren[dot]fr.

Now I wonder how come Facebook ads allowed it to run. It’s a counterfeit product, no doubt. It’s like selling Nikea shoes.

I as a tech aware person was alert but what about the unsuspecting people who might have actually bought the stuff?

What if the phony website stored credit card details?

I do believe that Facebook must be more strict about what kind of ads are being run on its platform.

What do you think?

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Abhishek Prakash

Linux Geek, Open Source Promoter, WordPress User, Growth Hacker and Web Publisher. Founder of It's FOSS.