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A few months ago I got a message on Instagram from an account that looked like a real clothing company. Their page had cool pictures a lot of followers and even comments that seemed legit. They told me they loved my profile and wanted me to be a brand ambassador. At first I honestly thought it was real because seeing something like that can make you feel special. They said all I had to do was click a link pick out products and pay just a small shipping fee. But after thinking about it more I realized it was actually a scam. The real purpose behind it was to get my money and possibly my personal information. The scammers make fake brand pages and pretend to pick random people as ambassadors. They want you to believe you are getting free stuff but really they are trying to charge you for products that do not even exist. Sometimes they even steal your credit card info after you enter it. The way it works is pretty sneaky. They use fake influencer style accounts buy followers and post staged photos so everything looks real. They also send the same copy and paste message to tons of people hoping someone will fall for it. If you click their link it leads to a website that looks like an online store but you will notice things like bad grammar low quality pictures and no real contact info. Basically it is designed to look convincing just long enough to get your payment.
Looking back there were a bunch of ways I could have figured out faster that it was fake
Check the account carefully The followers were mostly bots and the comments were repeated on every post
Look up the brand online The company did not exist anywhere except Instagram
Notice the too good to be true offer Most real companies do not randomly message you asking you to pay them to be an ambassador
Search for scams online When I looked up the name and the word scam a lot of warnings popped up from other people
Ask someone else When I showed my older brother he immediately said it sounded fake