I would guess there are not many of us who don’t have cell phones – even young kids have them. Most of us with cell phones have downloaded many apps. I’m assuming all cell phones come with pre-loaded apps we can use for messages, as calendars, and to store our pictures, to take pictures with the built-in camera – and many, many more. Then there are the apps we elect to download. Apps for banking, apps for weather, apps for music, and many more. Most of us have probably downloaded an app or two that allows us to play games.
Unless you pay to block ads, you know that any game you play on your phone will require you to watch an ad or two to allow you to go to the next level – or to continue the level you’re on once you’ve made too many mistakes.
Many of these ads are either trying to convince you to download another game or trying to sell you something. In my opinion, they are all annoying, but I refuse to pay to have them withheld – especially since paying that fee involves sending my credit card information to someone I have no idea where the company or person is, so I endure watching the ads to continue playing their game.
Most often I don’t pay much attention to the ads; I tend to lay my phone down, wait a couple of minutes for the ads to end, then pick up the phone and continue playing. Once in a while, I don’t lay the phone down and watch the ad. One day last week, there was an ad that was trying to sell pallets of products customers had returned to the company (it’s that company that is one of the nation’s largest warehouse delivery companies). In the ad, those return product pallets were on sale for $29. Anyone ordering wouldn’t know what’s on the pallet until it arrives and is opened. In the ad, the “customer” is shown opening a large box with dozens of products – anything from new cell phones or computers to kitchen appliances, etc.
After seeing the ad a few times over the past several months, I got curious and talked to my wife about it. She logged on to snopes.com and asked the question about these pallets. What the site told us is that the company in question never resells the returned products, so the ad trying to sell the pallets for $29 appears to be a scam.
Further research told me that the company takes returned products and grades the quality. Some are sold as new, some are heavily discounted, and others are donated or disposed of. That confirmed that the ads that are trying to sell pallets of returned products are not real – they are a scam.
There are too many of these examples to be able to name them; the best I can say is that the old saying has never been more accurate – “Buyer Beware!”
Have A Good Week!
