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“Hey everyone! I want to show you how to put the Ultimate Shefit Bra on,” says Sara Moylan, holding up a hot pink sports bra printed with her company’s logo. With her fitness-competitor physique, she looks like she knows what she’s talking about. The demonstration takes less than a minute, but to anyone who’s experienced the indignities of most sports bras, it’s oddly transfixing: The bra zips up in front like a vest, adjusts along the band with a strip of Velcro, and, with one swift pull from the front of the straps, lifts and separates like a push-up (just remember to hoist up “the girls” beforehand, Moylan advises). Who among us wouldn’t be compelled to watch such a video if it came up on our Facebook feeds?
Not many, it seems. Since it was uploaded in March, the demo has garnered more than 7 million views, driving hundreds of thousands of customers to the Shefit site, where many have shelled out $62 plus tax for the patented design. Only Shark Tank, which Moylan appeared on in 2016, provided a bigger boost, giving her a platform to grow her business from a Kickstarter-funded startup, as well as explain her idea: a sports bra that would let women customize their fit, provide enough support for high-intensity workouts (so she wouldn’t have to wear two bras at once), and accommodate fluctuations in size, which Moylan, as a mother of four, understood as an inevitability. The Facebook video was far simpler — it was shot for free in a friend’s fitness studio — but something about it just clicked. As the views climbed, Moylan recalls, “We stepped back and we said, ‘Why did this video go viral?’ It wasn’t because of the surroundings. It went viral because everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so cool. This is different.’ And then people just started sharing it and things just went crazy.”
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Posted by Shefit Apparel on Thursday, March 30, 2017
At first, “crazy” was a good thing. “Crazy” meant sales. Within a month or so, however, she began noticing the video popping up in her Facebook feed in ads for sites with names like She Loves Fit, Fitness-A-Holic, and Zonebuying, none of which she had ever heard of, never mind wholesaled bras to. Not long after that, the customer complaints started: claims that women who had paid $24.95 plus tax and shipping for what they thought were the bras in the video had received cheap imitations that lacked most of the product’s most compelling features, or worse, waited weeks and received nothing at all, only to find they couldn’t get a refund. Angry comments began piling up below Shefit’s Facebook posts from users who mistakenly believed the company was the one that had ripped them off and wanted to warn others not to make the same mistake (after all, the videos they watched did say Shefit, and in some cases the sham bras were labeled “SFit”). The company’s customer service reps were inundated with emails. All told, Moylan says, there were thousands of duped customers.
“That’s when we started saying, ‘Okay, we have a major problem on our hands, because a lot of these women don’t know that it was not us that scammed them, and they also don't know that it’s not our bra that they have that they’re coming to our site to complain about,’” Moylan says. She felt their frustration. No matter what she and her team tried to do, nothing seemed to stop the proliferation of copycat ads.
Facebook’s advertising policies strictly prohibit the use of material that infringes on a third party’s intellectual property rights, and in this case, the unauthorized videos should clearly be in violation. Freebooted material — that is, copyrighted content that’s been downloaded and re-uploaded without the creator’s permission, usually to reap profits on ad revenue — has been a problem on Facebook for years, and one the platform has recently begun to address with the launch of its Rights Manager tool, which lets creators track down infringing content and either take it down or make money off any mid-roll ads.
The technology, however, is primarily aimed at publishers and movie studios, not retailers whose ads go unexpectedly viral. Plus, this was new territory for Moylan, so she and her team tried whatever strategy they could think of: reporting many of the ads to Facebook and Shopify, the e-commerce platform that hosts many of the offending stores; contacting the stores through email and DM; sending the owners cease and desist letters through their legal counsel; and even putting out calls on their own page encouraging Shefit’s customers to report and call out these ads when they saw them, sometimes for the chance to win a free bra (this time an authentic one). Moylan also posted videos demonstrating how to know if you bought a real bra (tip number one: if you didn’t buy it from Shefit.com, you probably got duped) and comparing the bra with one of the knockoffs a customer sent in, which had flimsy Velcro at the shoulders and no adjustable strap at the back.
As they went, the team put together a spreadsheet of 30 pages they say used the video in their ads, and while some have since taken their ads down, Racked found over a dozen others while reporting this story. Ultimately, though, Moylan only had customer tips and her own Facebook feed to rely on to identify potential perpetrators, and for every ad or page that got taken down, she says, countless more seemed to pop up in its place.
So far, she says, the “absolute worst” to deal with, both in terms of the number of complaints and the lack of responsiveness, has been a site called Gear Just For You, whose “extreme lift adjustable sports bra” ad has amassed 25 million views, 20,000 comments, and more than 55,000 shares since it went up in June, the apparent result of a months-long targeted campaign using Shefit’s video. While the company’s Facebook page shows no visitor posts or reviews (both of which can be disabled or moderated by the page owner), Better Business Bureau gives it an F rating, ScamAdviser.com classifies it as “high risk” with an 8 percent rating, and hundreds of customers have taken to their personal Facebook pages, Shefit’s comments, and elsewhere to complain about goods taking weeks to ship from Asia and looking nothing like the advertised photos and videos when they arrived.
While the site advertises “Easy Returns” and “Satisfaction 100% Guaranteed,” many customers say they were refused refunds on the basis that the bra qualifies as an undergarment and was on sale when they purchased it, which, according to the site’s FAQ page, makes it final sale. Over the course of several weeks, however, Racked monitored the products carried on the site and was unable to find any products marked as full price, despite the countdown clocks on every page. Reached for comment, a representative directed us to the glowing four- and five-star reviews on the bra’s product page. (These, too, can be moderated by the site.) The representative did not respond to questions about product pricing or whether the site obtains permission to use videos created by other companies.
When users complained that the video misrepresented the product they received, Gear Just For You’s customer service reps responded that it was only intended as “reference” and “inspiration,” according to multiple screenshots shared on Facebook.
“That’s just false advertising,” says Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “We could say it in more words, but if you’re showing someone goods that aren’t your own and then delivering your own, that’s a problem.” The ads have no disclaimers stating that the videos don’t show the actual products, but even if they did, says Goldman, “You don’t get to change the deal. You don’t get to show the super slick product in the ad copy and then put in your boilerplate somewhere buried: ‘Oh, by the way, that has nothing to do with what you’re actually going to get.’”
On this basis alone, customers and competitors may have grounds to file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and their state attorneys general, he says, or even bring a lawsuit against the store. For customers that feel they’ve been scammed, initiating a chargeback with their credit card company is often the best recourse, though the refund process can take weeks or months to resolve. In order to accept credit cards, sites have to use a payment gateway like PayPal, Shopify Payments, or Stripe, all of which have safeguards in place so they aren’t on the hook for refunding a merchant’s customers. If they start to see a pattern of chargebacks or unusual transactions, they can suspend or even terminate the merchant’s account. As online platforms, Facebook and Shopify are protected from potential liability for transactions that occur between third parties under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Where they may not be protected, however, is in cases of copyright infringement where they are given adequate notice and fail to act, says Goldman.
For this reason, representatives from both companies tell Racked they prioritize these complaints and provide forms for users to report violations. They also explain, however, that complaints have to come from copyright holders directly in order to be verified, which means that any forms submitted by customers, however well-meaning, won’t affect a site’s standing. All Facebook users have the ability to report pages and ads for a variety of reasons, including as “misleading or a scam,” but from the platform’s perspective, these accusations are more challenging to verify, especially if the pages in question seem outwardly legitimate. Plenty of users, for instance, report businesses they have simply had bad experiences with (cable companies, airlines, and FedEx all come to mind). More than 5 million businesses advertise on Facebook each month, and while the platform reviews every ad before it’s posted, through a combined system of human moderators and artificial intelligence, it has struggled to stay ahead of misleading and malicious ads.
Adrienne Wallace, who handles public relations and social media for Shefit, says Shopify shut down several stores after her team filed copyright complaints, and a number of the Facebook pages that were using their video are no longer active. What’s less clear, however, is whether these companies then turned around and opened new stores and Facebook pages under different names, only to post the same ads again. According to screenshots reviewed by Racked, at least two stores accused of selling and never delivering products— Elly’s World and Jody’s Secret — appeared on customers’ credit card statements as “Woww Fashion.” Jody’s Secret sold sports bras using Shefit’s video, while Elly’s World sold steam hair straighteners using a video freebooted from Atlanta salon Studio Techilo. A representative for the salon says it has never given permission to any of the dozens of sites using it to sell discount straighteners or scam customers.
Both stores are now inactive on Shopify and Facebook, so angry customers have found other outlets to air their grievances: They’ve flooded the comments and reviews on Woww.Fashion, a Thailand-based Facebook page that’s been inactive since 2015 and doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the offending stores, with a couple hundred variations of “You're a f*cking SCAM!!!!!!!” Elly’s World, a small balloon-decorating company in the Netherlands, also has the misfortune of sharing a name with one of the sites, and saw its Google rating drop to 1.6/5 as scam complaints piled up. On Facebook, the company now repeatedly explains to users that it has never sold hair straighteners or sports bras, just balloons.
It’s difficult to get a full picture of how many customers and businesses have been affected by misleading ads, counterfeits, and scam sites. Complaints online call out businesses selling products that run the gamut from diet supplements and baby clothes to video game consoles and kayaks. Many specifically call out the viral Facebook ads that lead them to the sites in the first place, and the Shopify-hosted storefronts that processed the transactions.
By 2022, researchers predict that e-commerce will account for 17 percent of all retail sales in the US, up from an estimated 12.9 percent in 2017. But the industry isn’t just growing relative to brick and mortar; it’s also getting easier for anyone to enter the fray with their own online storefront. Shopify now has over 500,000 merchants using the platform and, along with competitors WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce, touts its affordable plans and easy-to-use interface to lure aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs.
The public Facebook posts of Scott Raley, the Ventura, California-based owner and CEO of Gear Just For You, give a sense of why the business might seem so appealing to get into, as well as how much money might be at stake. In August, Raley boasted about the store’s first million-dollar month, including a screenshot of his Shopify sales dashboard showing close to 26,000 sales. In June, a few days after the site first posted Shefit’s video, a similar screenshot showed just over $100,000 in monthly sales. Raley regularly posts about how “scaling up” the site’s Facebook ad spend has increased sales exponentially, in January saying his goal was to eventually spend $10,000 a day on advertising.
He also rhapsodizes about dropshipping, an increasingly common business model among e-commerce retailers, in which the companies hold no inventory and pay nothing up front to their suppliers, who are largely based in Asia, paying them only once a customer makes a purchase and letting them handle shipping. “Imagine the beauty of ‘drop-shipping,’” he writes. “You do not have to stock or touch any product... Your ad campaigns on facebook [sic] will run while you sleep. You’ll go to lunch while your phone is glowing with sales.” More and more aspiring e-commerce business owners are buying into this get-rich-quick promise, taking advantage of the rock-bottom barriers to entry offered by online platforms that let merchants sell other companies’ products as if they were their own, then give them the tools to promote them through inexpensive, hyper-targeted advertising.
Through an app, Shopify allows merchants to add products from China’s largest e-commerce marketplace, AliExpress, directly to their stores. Currently, dozens of manufacturers now sell zip-front “adjustable” sports bras on the platform for as low as $4.95 a piece, in some cases even using Shefit’s photos and logo, and Moylan says they’ve only multiplied in recent months. While Alibaba, AliExpress’s $480 billion parent company, has promised to crack down on counterfeits, the problem remains rampant. A study this year by brand-protection startup Red Points found that the marketplace topped the list of sites where fake goods are most frequently bought and sold, and BuzzFeed News spoke with numerous small businesses that said they alerted the site to copyright violations and counterfeits to no avail.
And while quality discrepancies may seem purely aesthetic on some products — your knockoff Gucci T-shirt, for instance — that’s clearly not the case for others. Sports bras, for instance, have to be supportive in order to perform (particularly in the D- and E-cup sizes many of the sites offer), which is why they’re so difficult to design well, and often so expensive. Counterfeit cosmetics and skincare products are even worse: Fakes have been found to contain carcinogens like arsenic, cadmium, and lead, along with human urine, cyanide, and rat droppings. Users, who often believe they’ve purchased an authentic product at a discount, have reported allergic reactions, eye infections, rashes, and burns. For brands, these unregulated products pose a risk to their reputation along with their bottom line.
Dermacol, a Czech cosmetics brand best known for its ultra-full-coverage Makeup Cover foundation, is fighting a constant battle against counterfeits, according to Barbora Bystřická, a representative of the company — so much so that there is a burgeoning YouTube genre devoted to how to spot a fake. The company complains that eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, and Wish are all awash in Dermacol knockoffs, and countless independent dropshippers advertise them heavily on Facebook, generally using material pulled from vloggers and publications on YouTube. Gear Just For You, for instance, has posted 50 such videos since June, advertising a product it claims is authentic, but which the Dermacol rep confirms is not. (Gear Just For You did not respond to multiple requests for comment about whether the site gets permission to use these videos.) What’s most confounding is that the knockoff is actually more expensive than the real thing in this case: Gear Just For You charges $24 per tube of foundation, which it, like many similar sites, claims is discounted from a regular price of $69; meanwhile, an authentic tube is available on Dermacol’s website for $15. The pricing is “complete nonsense,” says Bystřická, and she urges customers to be more cognizant of where they are buying from — often, she says, people contact the company about a potential fake they’ve purchased but have no idea what the store was called.
This, it seems, is part of an issue that Facebook is seeking to address. In September, the platform rolled out a feature called “Recent Ad Activity” that lets users see all the ads they’ve interacted with in recent months next to a tab with ads they’ve saved. It’s also promised to make its advertising business more transparent in the coming months in response to the revelations around Russia’s massive disinformation campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, along with reports of discriminatory targeting. The plans include hiring thousands of additional employees to monitor ads, as well as setting up a way for users to view all campaigns an advertiser is running at a given time along with basic targeting information. Still, Facebook has a huge incentive to keep the barriers to entry low for companies to advertise on the platform — ad sales last year accounted for 97 percent of its revenues, which for 2017 are projected to reach $40 billion.
It also has an incentive to maintain goodwill among its 2 billion monthly users. Warranted or not, users place trust in well-known platforms — this much is clear from the number of complaints expressing disbelief that Facebook and Shopify would continue doing business with companies that might not be legitimate. Sites take advantage of this, too: Under the section “Is this store secure/legit/real?” on Gear Just For You, the store specifically calls out Shopify as “the biggest and most reliable e-commerce platform in [sic] the planet.” Some shoppers reported getting sketchy vibes from Elly’s World and Jody’s Secret (they, too, furnished product pages with meaningless countdown clocks and seemingly random discounts) but were assuaged by the familiar checkout process and automated confirmation emails sent “via Shopify.com.” Seeing the ads come up in their feeds between their niece’s graduation photos and national news stories surely helped matters too.
As Facebook gets even bigger and more influential — and current trends indicates it will, provided antitrust regulators don’t intervene — advertisers will likely have increasing opportunities to profit by gaming its algorithms through whatever means possible. Without adequate safeguards in place to prevent companies from using hijacked content to reach (and rip off) millions of users, it’s likely these ads will only proliferate, competing against the brands whose videos and photos they’ve taken for a place in your feed. Facebook, after all, is still the only platform Shefit advertises on, as well as the brand’s number one source for new customers, and Moylan doesn’t anticipate that changing anytime soon. Nor does she expect the disappointed customers to stop coming.
“The more we can educate our consumers, the better. But you’re still going to have people trying to save a dollar. You’re still gonna have people buying off of these sites,” says Moylan. “I think it’s just something we’re gonna have to get used to. Right now it’s these awful scam sites. But who knows what it’ll be next.”