Why is it *sunglasses* the spambots want to sell my friends?

May 2, 2020 2:05 PM

Why are fake Ray-Bans the thing that the spambots always, always use your account to advertise if they guess your Facebook or Twitter password? Why fake sunglasses and not fake dick pills like the spambots used to sell? Like, OK, I'm sure the answer is "because it works," but I'm curious what makes this one work so much better than other scams they could be running.
posted by nebulawindphone to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

Because (almost) everyone buys sunglasses.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 2:34 PM on May 2, 2020

Because more people will respond to a sunglasses ad than they are a dick pill ad. The whole point is to get the personal info of as many people as possible.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:45 PM on May 2, 2020

I suspect that the number of people surprised by their friend/family member suddenly posting a sunglasses ad is going to be a lot lower than the people surprised by a sudden dick pill ad. These things work better the longer the ad stays up, and that means you need something people aren't as likely to report as suspicious.
posted by Aleyn at 3:24 PM on May 2, 2020

I mean, sure, but (almost) everyone buys cell phones, shoes, media subscriptions, gas, alcohol, and a squillion other annoyingly expensive things. Why sunglasses?

(You will say: Because it works! Because they discovered that a lot of people click on ads that sell sunglasses.

And I will reply: Okay, but if that's really true, why does it work? If we really overwhelmingly click "CHEAP RAY-BANS" over "WIN CHEAP GAS" or "FREE NETFLIX" or whatever, what is it about us as a culture or a species or whatever that makes sunglasses that much more compelling to us?)
posted by nebulawindphone at 3:26 PM on May 2, 2020

You buy sunglasses cheap and you sort of know what you are getting. Buy dick pills and that takes a lot of faith to ingest them and see if they work. Will only know if they don't work at a very bad time.
posted by AugustWest at 4:28 PM on May 2, 2020

For this kind of scam to work, the product should be:

Sold online
A physical product that gets shipped in the mail (otherwise it's obvious immediately that it's a scam)
Not something that is well known to be sold only by one official retailer
Expensive enough that even at a 90% discount you're paying real money for it
Easy to make a fake website for (doesn't require a ton of variety in your fake inventory)
Inoffensive and ideally unregulated, so your ad won't get taken down immediately
Universally popular, to attract the largest possible audience

All of which sunglasses fit. A final bonus for sunglasses is that everybody knows glasses are sold at a huge markup, so 90% off sunglasses is not the immediate obvious indicator of a fake that it might be for another product category.
posted by phoenixy at 5:31 PM on May 2, 2020

Wait, do sunglasses actually show up in your mailbox after you give the scammers your credit card information? I presumed it was a scam all the way down.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:02 AM on May 4, 2020

Oh, no, it's totally a scam.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:04 AM on May 4, 2020