The Scam Isn''t in Your Inbox. It''s in Your Feed
We''ve spent two decades training people to be suspicious of email. Check the sender address. Hover before clicking. Never trust an unexpected link.
Almost none of that training covers where the money is actually going now. In 2025, people reported losing more than $95 million to scams that started when they ordered something after seeing an ad on social media. Total reported losses to scams that began on social platforms hit $2.1 billion. Shopping scams were the single most reported category.
The FTC has put out two alerts on this in the space of a week, which tells you plenty about the complaint volume.
The uncomfortable answer about ad vetting
The FTC took the obvious question head-on this month: are the ads in your feed checked for scams?
Not reliably. Platforms don''t always thoroughly vet the ads they show you, or the advertisers behind them.
That one fact undoes the instinct most of us run on. An email from a stranger feels like it came from outside. An ad in your feed feels like it came from inside — sitting next to your friends'' posts, formatted like the rest of the app, apparently cleared by a company you have an account with. That whiff of endorsement is exactly what the scammer is buying, and it costs about as much as an ad slot.
What this wave looks like right now
Two patterns pulled separate FTC alerts in August.
First, designer goods at prices that don''t make sense. A bag that retails in the four figures, offered at a sliver of it, in an ad styled like every other retail ad you scroll past.
Second, the get-rich pitch. Learn to trade online, get rich, quit your job — usually delivered by somebody leaning on a car they may not own, in a country they may not be in.
The machinery underneath is identical. The ad sends you to a counterfeit site built to collect payment details and personal information. Whether a knockoff turns up or nothing does is almost beside the point. The card number was the product.
Four checks that survive the feed
Leave the ad before you verify anything. Don''t tap through and size up the site you land on — that site was built to pass exactly that inspection. Open a fresh tab, search the brand name plus "scam," and see what comes back. A real retailer has a trail behind it. A storefront that appeared three weeks ago doesn''t.
Treat the discount itself as the warning. Seventy percent off something people currently want isn''t a bargain you stumbled into. It''s the hook. Real clearance happens, but it happens on last season''s stock, not on the item everyone is talking about this month.
Pay with something that has a dispute process. Credit cards come with chargeback rights. Bank transfers, gift cards and payment apps used in "friends" mode don''t. If a seller nudges you toward the second group, that nudge is the whole tell.
Ask what''s actually being sold. With the trading and side-income ads, the product is almost never trading. It''s a course, a subscription, a "mentorship." Those profit screenshots are unverifiable by design, which is the design.
The part worth sitting with
None of this requires you to be careless. It works precisely because the environment feels vetted — and it''s running on infrastructure built to make advertising feel native and trustworthy.
Until platforms treat ad approval as a security job rather than a billing one, your feed has earned the same suspicion we spent twenty years learning to point at email. Same instinct. New surface.
Image: Nataliya Vaitkevich, via Pexels
