OfferUp Fake Buyers
When OfferUp was released in 2011, with a nice brand with a cool way to sell merchandise online. So I decided to try it. After signing up I posted 2 laptops. Both ads had 5 photos, a title, description, tags etc. After 5 mins of posting I had buyers sending me offers. Cool right? Wrong. I know my ads look good, but that was a little too fast. So I responded to the low ball offers, but no one replied. After an hour my inbox was full of spam from OfferUp’s fake buyer accounts. Must have been 20 fake buyers within an hour. Yuck. Who knows how this company will do, but for now I’m staying away from OfferUp.
they were struggling to get traffic. So they did what everyone else did, they used software bots to create fake ads. Their intent was to fool sellers and buyers to think ads where real. Meanwhile buyers and sellers were interacting with ads created by bots. When you placed an ad, almost immediately you would get a response. Something wasn’t right and people knew it. That’s what many of the new online companies did back then in order to get customers.
An industry that was notorious for creating fake ads were dating sites. When a dating site has a grand opening with 10,000 gorgeous female models, you know something is up.