Aliexpress Scams and Free Money

There are, seemingly, infinite amount of scams. Most of money circulation beyond purchase of real goods is selling smoke and mirrors to people who want to believe in something impossible.
Over the last few days I’ve been unfortunate enough to open an Aliexpress product listing in the spirit of “remove/reverse/increase aging/wrinkles/teeth whiteness/hair/…” and so since Aliexpress tends to shove in your face and in search results many sponsored items or items similar to what you bought before (no i don’t need 5 other phone covers when i bought one thank you) i have started seeing many of these ‘miracle products’.

case study

note: i have not verified any of the information given below (the cost of the operation, where might it be located, the exact process)

a single bottle of this norally costs $17 and the most expensive pack of 10+12 free costs $197 so a bottle will cost you anywhere from $17 to $19.

the reviews are clearly completely fake and infact i have successfuly made an LLM generate a review that could be copy pasted and it wouldn’t stand out in the sea of fake reviews.

Scraping random faces from facebook or generating some with image generators and then making a “younger” (/hairier/more attractive/….) counterpart has also become a completely automatable process with image generators.

The whole operation has almost no overhead apart from aliexpress seller fees, buying residential proxies in G7 (possibly also phone numbers for verification), buying stickers/boxes to seem more legit at first glance and shipping a glass/plastic bottle/tube of sunflower oil or similar so that the listing will survive for longer until taken down.

the sad reality

This isn’t bought by people who have either the mental fortitude to actually figure out things that do work for skin (skin is scrubbing, using moisturizer and sunscreen), hair growth (e.g. Minoxidil) or any other possible visual “imperfections” they might have, but by people who are desperate because of peer pressure or advertisements. The money travels from sad, desperate people to scammers who welcome and invite to buy their brand of snake oil (only $20 a bottle for a month!)

Aliexpress has many scams and does try to prevent most of those, but it has no incentive to stop things from being sold unless they’re illegal or outright dangerous.

the Winter Sale has some pretty nice deals tho.