I took another look at my Facebook ads today and found some new ones that looked more than a little suspicious:
The most interesting one was the Louis Vuitton ad. As far as I can recall, it’s just the second time that I’ve seen scammers advertise this brand on Facebook (first time was here). It’s often repeated that over 85% of Tokyo women in their 20s own a piece of Louis Vuitton, though I think this figure is highly exaggerated. Still, it remains an extremely popular brand here and a status symbol that people work hard to buy. It’s worth remembering that “one out of three single women between the ages of 18 and 65 lives on a disposable income of ¥85,000 or less per month*”.
The domain pascherlouisvuitton-ka.com was registered on September 20, 2012, which is unusual as most spammers on Facebook have registered the domains they use within the last month. Not only that, but the people behind pascherlouisvuitton-ka.com have even set up privacy protection for the domain through privacyprotect.org. That means it’s not possible to see who registered it (not that the information would be accurate anyway). However, the domain is hosted at dnspod.net, which seems to be based in China.
Luckily the website itself is not very sophisticated, so hopefully no one will be fooled into buying from them:
