I don't know about this life of ours...
It's finally springtime, and that means that millions of people across the northern hemisphere are celebrating the start of gardening season.
@cosmictriage and I consider ourselves "suburban homesteaders," and do what we can to be as self-sufficient as possible... within limits.
Naturally, I spend a good bit of time looking at suppliers of heirloom seeds, plants and various gardening accessories.
Naturally — in "that way" of the modern web — I subsequently end up getting served up all manners of advertising, most of it related to gardening.
The thing that both surprises and alarms me is how many scams are aimed at people who garden. Is nothing sacred, anymore?
OK, so I was looking at various "kits" for elevated planter boxes we could use to expand our space in a part of the garden where water runoff from up the hill behind the house makes the soil perpetually "swampy" and thus not very useful.
That was about a week ago... and now I've increasingly noticed that I get served ads for these products, except "at deep clearance prices."
Maybe I'm just less naive than most, but there's no way I'm going to get a 2'x 8' planter box on 36" legs for $29.98 and "free shipping on purchases over $50." And yet? Those ads abound. Particularly on Facebook... which claims to take considerable care to make sure marketplace sellers are "vetted."
Not exactly!
Just the lumber and steel alone would run a good $60, not to mention free shipping on something that weight a good 80lbs or so. That's just simple math.
The genuine article, from a reputable garden supplies seller runs about US $300 or so.
The scammers are — of course — both bold and cheeky, actually stealing the product images from legitimate manufacturer/sellers and putting them on their own web sites.
A quick WHOIS lookup usually reveals that the domain we registered less than a week previously, and typically somewhere in S.E.Asia.
Another quick give-away is that the company "address" is typically a PMB styled listing, meaning it's a private mail box at something like a FedEx or UPS store... and the shipping turns out to actually originate somewhere very far overseas, China, most of the time.
These are probably the same people who regularly advertise "discounted stamps" where you can buy a roll of 100 US letter stamps — $63.00 from the post office — for $24.95.
I suppose what bothers me most about this whole circus is the fact that these ads show up on sites like Facebook and eBay... tolerated by sites that will normally suspend/deplatform people for even having the wrong opinion about something!
I guess we just live in an age where we have to be careful of everything, because there's pretty much a potential scammer under every stone!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2023-04-01 00:24 PST
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