“Brushing Scam” Affecting Billings Residents
UGH, we fell for the scam!
Online shopping was big before the pandemic, but now it’s bigger than ever. It usually makes our lives easier with a click of a button, and bam! The package shows up and we get all happy. Yay for capitalism and materialism!
But here’s what happened. We moved here two months ago. We started buying furniture for our house like porch swings, and lawn chairs. We found the cutest swing on Amazon go on our quaint little porch, so my spouse purchased it. It’s now been weeks- still no chair. See photo below.
But did we check the reviews??
Yep! The reviews were stellar. 5 stars for this Bohemian chair. We were thrilled and waited for this package to show up. Just yesterday another, very small package showed up. I’ve been known to order crap whilst drinking wine... oops. But this wasn’t one of those items.
The Sunglasses that showed up
A pair of (I'm assuming fake) "$160 Ray-Ban sunglasses" show up in my spouse’s name. We open it, the box is crinkled. The packing slip said,
“Please leave a review for the product.” We will not be leaving a review. Look at the little card they sent. The support email is NOT A REAL EMAIL.
This is called, “The Brushing Scam.”
My co-host Michael from the Morning Mix 97.1 had this same situation happen to him! Random packages he never ordered just show up on his doorstep, with a packing slip begging for the customer to leave a review.
The idea of the scam is to get you to purchase stuff like my boho swing after reading the stellar reviews. The scammers send an entirely different product begging for a glorious review to trick future customers. They think they're smart.
Why is this affecting Billings so much?? I never heard of this until moving here.
I want to warn you, so you too, don't waste your hard earned money. Always check the retailer, these scams are getting more and more clever by the day.