Free Barnes and Nobles (AI generated Facebook scams)

So, here I am, scrolling through Facebook while being mildly entertained by my relatives arguing about politics, when I see this post.

Ooh! Books! I like books. I happen to talk constantly about Barnes and Nobles. And this post, well, it has nice grammar and punctuation and everything! I happen to be susceptible to the promise of cheap hardcovers and so I go to the comments.

Hmmmm.

HMMMMMMM.

Ok, so I immediately clock the link as sus, but it’s interesting how many comments there are of people also showing off their beautiful hardcover book hauls.

It’s also interesting how Amanda’s profile seems pretty normal compared to a lot of Facebook profiles that usually have scams. There’s some family pictures and everything. Her first post was in November of last year and shows her profile picture.

I’m not entirely good at spotting AI images these days, but a closer look at the beautiful promises books reveals some AI artifacts, since the text is a little garbled. On first glance, I believed the lies of this photo, but then, I can’t even tell you what any of these books are, because they don’t exist.

The comments are also interesting since they post photos of their own book hauls. This one could be real, but reverse image search didn’t bring anything up and it’s rather grainty. I checked and these books exist? Mostly?

As far as I can tell, the comments are all posting pictures of actual books. These are all also bot accounts as far as I can tell, and there’s usually 10-20 comments on each of these posts. They’re also all kinda weirdly grainy and look like they’re from the same camera despite being from different accounts.

I’m not going to dig too much into this since I want to get to the very obviously phishing aspect of this whole thing: the website itself. What is this o-so-magical site that promises hardcover books?

I could go into all the ways this is a phishing site, but this is all well documented and it’s pretty standard, with a form, little animations, fake pressure, all to get you to fill out credit card info. I’m surprised they didn’t use more AI generated content for this, because the grammar of this whole website kinda reveals it’s before scammers started using AI to me?

This is likely a ‘Phishing as a service’ platform that the scammer is using right out of the box, which is why the website itself isn’t updated. The tactic to get people to click on the link feels unique to me since it’s a bit more subtle than other ones I’ve seen, and there are a lot more natural sounding comments underneath instead of what I’ve seen before

I think these comments were written by a human? And likely one person, since the speach patterns feel the same to me. The post appears to be written by AI, and the images of smiling generic Barnes and Nobles employees are also AI.

It fooled me enough to check out the comments.