Online shopping is nothing new, but it seems the explosive rise of TikTok has made way for thousands of new companies to hawk their wares on the Internet. However, as YouTuber Safiya Nygaard recently discovered, not all of those are legitimate.
Nygaard recently published a video detailing her experience navigating the world of TikTok ads, and she discovered several markers to help identify scams. Over the course of four weeks, she found dozens of ads from different companies that appeared to display the exact same product, a floral corset sundress.
Nygaard recorded each dress ad that appeared on her TikTok feed, bought four of the dresses to compare them and shared some of her thoughts on identifying scams. Here’s what she found on how to avoid falling for online shopping scams.
Is it safe to buy stuff from TikTok ads?
While some TikTok ads are from reputable companies, Nygaard said it appears the platform does not regulate the legitimacy of the companies who purchase ad space. It is therefore up to the consumer to determine which products are safe to buy.
Nygaard recorded TikTok ads from 32 different websites, all of which appeared to show the same dress and used the same images or clips to promote the product. She identified 36 people whose videos were featured in the ads, none of whom had actually purchased the dress from the companies who were using their videos.
Thirty-two of those people identified the dress in their original videos as a $200 one from upscale fashion brand House of CB, while three were from Amazon and one was from Commense.
“I think that implies these websites are not showing you a single image of the product that they are actually selling,” Nygaard said in the video.
Nygaard ended up purchasing four dresses: the original from House of CB and three duplicates she found through TikTok ads. The cheapest one, a four-dollar dress from since-deleted website Infec, never arrived.
“We did in fact get scammed out of $4 for the (Infec) dress ... plus $7 for shipping,” Nygaard said.
Neither of the dresses Nygaard purchased from the TikTok ads were as they had been advertised, as neither actually had a corset back and one came in the wrong color. The only dress that arrived as advertised was the original House of CB dress.
How to avoid a scam
There are several tips to be learned from Nygaard’s experience. Here’s how to spot a scam TikTok ad:
1. Watch out for flashy graphics and typos. Nygaard noticed that reputable companies had simpler ads with few pictures or videos, whereas scam websites would stitch together several clips with lots of arrows and words flashing across the screen. The websites themselves also had typos and poor editing, which suggested they were thrown together quickly.
2. Avoid ads that make bizarre or unfounded claims. Several of the sites in Nygaard’s video claimed they were “Oprah’s Favorite Sundress” and included names of famous magazines like “Vogue” without any sources to back up their claims.
3. Do your research on the company. Many ads were posted by companies whose TikTok pages only had those stitched-together clips rather than any original content. The companies also had very little online history, and even the reviews on their websites appeared to have been copied from Amazon. Make sure you buy from a reputable source that has verified reviews and history.
4. If a price seems to good to be true, it probably is. Nygaard never received her four-dollar dress, which did not appear to surprise her. You can’t expect to get quality goods for suspiciously low prices, and sometimes you’ll end up getting nothing at all.