Just a couple hours ago I was scrolling IG and came upon this G700 post, submitted by jdmgram, an Instagram account about CARS!
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This page has over 1,000,000 followers and gets many more views through mention and reposts. Let’s do some math:
-Out of the 1M people, let’s say 80% are not interested in flashlights, at any price, any lumens. They just don’t care about flashlights.
-The remaining 200,000 people who have interests in flashlights, 90% already know or found out that it is a scam. That leaves 20,000.
-Let’s assume only 10% of those 20,000 are fooled by the videos and are interested in buying the light.
-But only half of them have the cash to buy it.
That’s still 1,000 People falling into the scam. A THOUSAND. By only paying some cash to the IG account holder, 100% legal and super easy thing to do.
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However, most people were’nt happy with the advertising:
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Then I visited their own IG, plenty of posts and followers huh…
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But why I don’t see any negative comments? See the amount of people mentioning their friends… this is just sad.
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So at this point I decided to comment “THIS IS A SCAM!”. And guess what? my comment was IMMEDIATELY removed and I was banned from their page (can’t see their posts anymore):
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So they actually have people watching the page 24/7 and deleting every negative comment and banning the user from seeing their posts.
not only that - they managed to get regrammed by almost all hobby pages. cars, trucks, car parts, guns, weapons, knives, etc! I see G700 ads at least 4-5 times a day now. whoever owns/runs the G700 scam is really good at social marketing?!
I have a raspberry Pi dns adblocker (pi-hole) with really good lists but nothing in the world currently works against posts you actually follow (or, for sponsored ads on IG since they inject them into your feed - there is no blocker for that)
I guess the mfg. of that light somehow learned that I make custom lights. I get 15 emails a week wanting me to have them private label them for Texas Lumens.
Thanks to the wider EDC and “prepper” movement across social media there are now so many scams going on… backpacks, outdoor gear, flashlights, knives, and more.
Yeah, it is true, now you can see everything on the social media, i mean, i can’t say it is bad or it is good, it is just modern, but the scams are certainly a thing related to the bad ones. 4 years ago you could be surprized by the fact that g700 was the object of some scams, now you can see anything, literraly. And instagram, man it became the main source and place for scams, as people already tend to forget about facebook, and just imagine how much money those guys are earning. Just like the pages which offer you such a service like ’’buy real instagram followers, man, that is some sort of new kind of stupidity from some people who believe it.
In a weird way you have to wonder how these guys are pulling this off:
They have to find and design a business model that works.
Buying ads on IG, Facebook or the wider web is expensive. Assuming they are “dropshipping”, they have to make sure the product is available, in stock and will be shipped and also make sure it arrives (just imagine how many lights don’t end up with us on a smaller scale even). They have to manage payment acceptance, the tax side of the story and also fund some aspects upfront. You need digital designers, photographers and more to make the scam look legit.
With all the other ads for genuine products and services going on, the noob user won’t know the difference anyhow.
The tittle seemed familiar and to my surprise I was the OP. I completely forgot about about it.
This scam, or unfortunately how people might call it nowadays: online business models, is still alive and kicking but they have evolved to have a less aggressive marketing but a more organic one using influencers and real people with real faces. The same products but now someone backs it up, and because that person or page has certain amount of followers people naturally assume he is trustworthy.
I just scroll past it now and let people be, I realized it’s impossible to fight stupidity on social media.
If you follow enough people on youtube, they are all doing the same thing.
“A lot of you have been contacting me about my magnetic eyelashes…” - said no follower ever.
There is Monat, FX trading courses, every shade of makeup, CupShe, zaful, and all the other “brands”
I am quite astonished how every little product niche has been moved to China. Literally everything we wear, carry, use or touch is now almost exclusively from Asia.
