This musical instrument retailer does not exist
In which Facebook finally manages to serve relevant ads to my sock account, except the ads are scams
In a June 2024 article, I analyzed the set of posts Facebook’s recommendation algorithm served to a sock account that I primarily use for browsing guitar and bass gear. At that time, very little of the recommended content, including the ads, was in any way related to the content I was intentionally viewing; instead, I was almost exclusively shown AI-generated images, mostly of outdoor scenes.
At first glance, the situation appears to have improved somewhat, at least with regard to advertising. In a July 2nd, 2025 Facebook session, almost all of the ads I was shown were for musical instruments. Unfortunately, the majority of them turned out to be scams.
The ads in question appear to offer massive discounts from large online music gear retailers such as Sweetwater, Musician’s Friend, and Guitar Center. In reality, however, the ads link to impostor sites with domain names designed to resemble those of the sites being mimicked. All of the fake music retailer sites have Cloudflare IP addresses; domain registrars vary from site to site, and some of the sites only remain online briefly. Many of the fake websites have a green “Trusted Store” label in the lower right corner; these labels are absent from the real versions of the sites.
The impersonation efforts sometimes contain obvious errors, such as a fake Musician’s Friend website that somehow ended up paired with a fake Guitar Center domain name (guitarcenterz dot sa dot com). Despite the shiny green “Trusted Store” label in the lower right corner, ordering from this alleged retailer is unlikely to work out well for the prospective customer.
The fake websites contain numerous listings for musical instruments and related gear, and these listings are unsurprisingly scraped from the real online marketplaces that the fake sites are impersonating. The fake listings feature images and text plagiarized from the original listings, with the full price slightly adjusted and the imaginary massive discount applied. In some cases, incorrect parsing of original listings and their associated URLs results in bizarre errors like the “Ibanez Used Schecter Guitar Research HELLRAISER C 9 9 STRING”, which conflates two distinct brands, Ibanez and Schecter.
In some cases, the listings on the fake sites include obviously incorrect details not present in the original listings. For instance, the listing above contains the bizarre claim that 382 people have purchased the same relatively obscure used guitar in the last week, and 24 more are still in stock. Since outlets that sell used instruments generally do not have an endless number of copies of unusual items, this bogus detail only serves to further demonstrate the inauthenticity of the listing.
Several of the Facebook pages advertising the fake websites have been renamed. The renamed pages originally had three-part names such as “Jessica Newnam Abby”, “Diane Gene Lia”, and “Corder Villermaux Grozco”, before being renamed to more business-esque names such as “Musical Instruments Clearance”, “Factory Outlet”, and “Lowest Price Clear Out”. Some of the pages have been renamed more than once, churning through multiple business names.
At least seven of the Facebook pages running ads for the fake music retailers have posted StyleGAN-generated faces in the past, and at least one (“Megan Ross Gabrielle”) is presently using a StyleGAN-generated face as an avatar. These face images contains several indicators of their artificial origin, such as the “side demon” visible on the face posted by “Store Closing Sale”, as well as the surreal background and fabric seen in several of the images. All seven images also have identical eye placement, a fingerprint of unmodified StyleGAN faces.