[Onkel Neal]

It's becoming more prevalent than ever. Facebook ads are estimated to be 50% fake store fronts.

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fra...-shopping.html

Bass, the attorney in Austin, was in the market for a coat when the Facebook ad caught her eye.

She’d bought a number of sweaters, scarves and shoes from similar ads without any issues. So she followed the link and purchased two coats from KeliSexin. She didn’t pay attention to the URL, she said, and assumed that the social media site had vetted the ad. A spokeswoman for Facebook said an automated system reviews ads to make sure they’re not selling prohibited items such as tobacco, dietary supplements and payday loans. Identifying companies that sell counterfeit products, she said, can be more difficult, and Facebook often relies on user reports to flag such content. She added that the company is reviewing KeliSexin’s ads.

Bass said she typically reads customer reviews and does reverse image searches for products on websites she’s not familiar with. “But this time I didn’t,” she said. “And I got burned.”

She used a debit card to pay $112.49 for two coats. Weeks later, she’s still trying to get a refund for the order, which arrived from a San Diego warehouse.

When she asked to return the coat, a company representative told her she’d have to ship it to China, according to emails Bass shared with The Post. “It may be lost in the process of returning,” the representative told her. “If lost, we can’t refund the money to you.”

Getting a refund, experts say, can often be difficult. Most consumers don’t catch on until days or weeks later, when they receive a faulty product in the mail (or perhaps nothing at all). By then, the site in question has probably been shut down, leaving shoppers with little recourse.

Kevin Whitaker didn’t have particularly high expectations when he paid $54 for a shearling sheepskin coat from Neathot.com. But he liked the color and thought it looked nice.

“I figured it was an imitation but I read the reviews and thought I’d just wear it casually,” the Pittsburgh-based truck driver said.

He paid an extra $6.95 for three-day shipping. Two weeks later, he has yet to receive anything from the now-defunct website. (As for the item in the photo, it turned out to have been a $3,395 Overland coat.)

“This was my first time buying from a site I don’t know and I’ll never do it again,” he said. “I feel cheated.”