For as long as there’s been the internet, there have been internet scammers.
For people like 40-year-old Windsor resident Brendan Dangelo, that risk feels more or less easy to navigate with a few simple rules: Be careful which download button you click, and don’t send personal information over email.
“We think we’re pretty internet literate,” Dangelo said of himself and his partner. “We sort of scoff at people that fall for internet scams.”
But recently, he said, his partner saw an ad on Facebook for steeply discounted Darn Tough socks — the iconic Vermont brand whose devoted followers gather in hordes at its Northfield factory for an epic annual sock sale — and the two of them got excited. They followed the ad to a website and bought several pairs, only to discover after a couple days that they’d been scammed. The couple had to cancel their credit card to protect their finances, Dangelo said.
Fake websites are a common type of online scam: 178 people reported being duped by them to the Vermont Attorney General’s office in 2023, making it the seventh most common scam in Vermont last year. But Dangelo said what tricked them was seeing the ad on Facebook.
His band, Windsor-based The Pilgrims, has advertised on the platform, so he said he knew there was a review process before any ad made it onto users’ feeds. When he and his partner saw the fake ad there, it was easier to believe the sale was real, which may otherwise have seemed too good to be true — which indeed, it was.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, states in its resources for businesses that there is a primarily automated review period for ads that usually takes less than 24 hours, and only “in some cases” do humans manually review suspicious ads. Representatives from Meta did not respond to a request for further comment on the process.
Dangelo is far from the only Vermonter to fall victim to such social media-based scams. Darn Tough Vermont saw hardly any scam impersonations before this spring, but has seen more and more since then, its director of digital commerce Ryan Dahlstrom said in an interview. At one point recently, he said, company representatives were receiving around six tips about scammers every day.
Darn Tough alerted its audience of the trend in late March with a post to Facebook instructing people to be careful to purchase from its official site and not impersonators. Dahlstrom said the statement only half worked.
The company received an outpouring of thanks on the post, and some responses saying they had fallen for the scam or almost did. In the weeks after, though, Dahlstrom said Darn Tough and particularly its trusted partner businesses got lots of commenters on their legitimate advertisements telling other Facebook users that they were scams.
“I was like, ‘Ah shit, we shot ourselves in the foot,’” Dahlstrom said.
The ramifications hit the company’s partners hard around Memorial Day weekend, Dahlstrom said. And the spoof ads kept coming.
“It felt like the more we did, the more rampant it became.”
Darn Tough employees now use a three-pronged approach to warding off scammers, Dahlstrom said: They alert Facebook’s brand protection team whenever they see a spoof ad; they have their attorneys file takedown notices on the fake websites; and they provide customers that email them to report the scam with guidance on what to do next if they’ve fallen for it.
Still, he acknowledged, “a lot of it’s out of our hands.” The most they can do is continue to report impersonations as they see them, and advise their customers to be safe on the internet, buying socks or whatever else they are doing.
“If it’s not us, it will be somebody else,” Dahlstrom said. “From the consumer perspective, you’ve just got to be careful what you’re clicking on.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Darn Tough is wrestling with ‘rampant’ social media scams. In Vermont, it’s not alone..