Since I have not written about the Facebook Japan scam this month, here is another update: Surprise, surprise! Facebook Japan has taken absolutely no action to stop fraudsters advertising. Here are just a couple that I saw today: newbalanceshop-jp.com was registered just a few days ago by an individual living in ” niuyork, AL 52365″. Now, that is a great address: On the other hand, 2013shop-jp.com is registered through GoDaddy at the equally interesting address “fdfdf, Georgia 43433”: Since both domains were registered through GoDaddy, I will report them to GoDaddy and see what happens.

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 worthContinue reading »

Facebook is doing nothing to stop the scam ads for counterfeit products. On the other hand, the Chinese scammers are improving their game. Today I saw a couple of ads for Oakley and Ray-Ban: I first took a look at balala.asia, which was registered just a few days ago for 1 year: As I have stated previously as well, an easy way for Facebook to stop these scammers would be to extra carefully review ads submitted for domains registered during the last few months or so. It’s well-known that the age of a domain is one factor considered by GoogleContinue reading »

Here are a couple more fraudulent Facebook advertisements that I discovered today: watch-shop-japan.com is somewhat interesting as it is the first advertisement that I’ve seen for fake watches. The brands sold include Diesel, Rolex, and Tag Heuer. As normal the domain has been registered by a scammer in China: jp-oakley.com follows the same pattern as the other scam sites advertising on Facebook: Facebook could easily stop these ads by double checking the domain registration dates for sites that want to advertise on Facebook. All the sites that I have featured so far have domains that were registered during the lastContinue reading »

Just to show that Facebook has not stopped accepting advertising from fraudulent online stores: kukinifree.com uses a gmail address ([email protected]) as contact information and the domain was registered in China last year: To me this does not look like a very reputable website for Nike shoes. The [email protected] email address was actually also used for the Oakley sites that I wrote about earlier this year. Today I came across this blog post written by a Japanese user. Even if you can not read Japanese, you can see that he received fake and broken sunglasses after seeing an advertisement for oakleyjpshop.comContinue reading »

Some of the bigger atheist Facebook pages, including Addicting Info and Antitheists, have been posting the following photo on Facebook today: As you can see above, the quotation states: “Women are naturally unfit for political office. Both the natural order and facts show us that the political being par excellence is male; the Scripture shows us that woman has always been the helper of man who thinks and does, but nothing more“. Not surprisingly, this quotation is spreading like wildfire on twitter as well. The problem is of course that the pope has never said such a thing. In anContinue reading »

If you administer a Facebook page with a significant number of likes, you will unfortunately become the target of spammers that will target your page with all kinds of advertisements. Facebook does a fairly good job of detecting these ads and banning the fake accounts responsible, but some spam attacks can go on for several days before being stopped. One spam ad that we have been seeing a lot of recently looks like this: The scamsters can create fake Facebook accounts much quicker than you’re able to delete their ads, and most Facebook pages don’t have the resources to monitorContinue reading »

It’s popular to think that Facebook knows everything about you, but it’s actually far from the truth. As a foreigner living in Japan, the ads shown to be are usually quite irrelevant. For example, today I was targeted by an advertisement for English conversation lessons: I guess it is a step up from being targeted by ads for Chinese counterfeiters. The situation in the US is not necessarily any better. When I visited last month, I was targeted by all kinds of ads that probably would be better directed at women: In this case it’s presumably the advertiser, or whicheverContinue reading »