Pro-MAGA accounts on X recently falsely accused Indians of running a merchandise buying scam on Meta & duping Americans. But this claim lacks teeth & basis.
Our investigation reveals it is far from the truth. This scam empire is actually run not by Indians but Bangladeshis!
Recently, an X user falsely accused Indians of running a vast network of state pride-themed Meta (Facebook) groups, using recycled content to boost engagement for Meta’s creator fund, while exploiting Americans emotionally & selling them low-quality/ undelivered products.
However, the user lacked plausibility & evidence in blaming Indians. We checked that this scam was indeed happening on
@Meta at a much larger level than one could fathom! Meta, once a revolutionary platform, has now become the hotbed of these large-scale scams.
Our investigation reveals it aren’t the Indians running this scam. This massive scam is being run by Bangladeshis who are duping Americans by selling substandard/ undelivered goods through multiple groups on Meta laced with sentimental themes.
The scam playbook Create or infiltrate large Facebook groups with emotional themes, gain admin privileges, and exploit users’ trust. These groups often have hundreds of thousands of members who may be less familiar with spotting digital scams.
We found over 40+ groups on Meta run by these Bangladeshi scammers with a cumulative member size exceeding 3.8 million! These pages are based on state pride themes like “I Grew Up in Texas,” “Born & Raised Michigan”. Well-executed influence ops. to scam Americans.
While these scammers manage to attract thousands of Americans based on their state-specific themes, they effectively build trust, possibly by tapping into nostalgia, regional identity, or community sentiment. Also, leveraging emotional connections & a sense of belonging, which lures individuals into their trap.
Who’s pulling the strings?
While the true identities remain unclear, at least 2 pages that manage these 40+ groups appeared consistently, i.e., “Barbara Walters” & “Diana Yellen.” Both appear to be fake personas, jointly serving as mods/admins for this network of groups.
Bangladeshi Links!
Other mods/ admins of these pages are either fake identities or Bangladeshi accounts. A closer look at these accounts & pages revealed they’re intertwined with a vast network of Bangladeshi profiles, predominantly from the Dhaka and Sylhet regions.
While the operation seems sophisticated, several accounts in these groups display bot-like behavior, posting at suspicious intervals with identical patterns. They recycle content that resonates with each state’s residents to farm engagement while simultaneously running merchandise scams using emotional manipulation.
These actors exploit the Autism awareness month theme to manipulate sentiments of Americans to sell their products A cursory search with the keyword “my autistic son” leads to plethora of similar posts in multiple groups to sell quilts using images likely AI-generated.
Not long ago, the same tactic was being used by these actors, exploiting the same cause to sell other T-shirts, hoodies, and mugs based on the Print-on-Demand (PoD) model via these Meta groups. Similar keywords can lead to floods of posts in these groups.
For their operations, these scammers use temporary websites to showcase the products. For that, they use various e-commerce platforms tailored for drop-shipping, print-on-demand, and white-labelling, such as Shopbase, Shopsflare, etc.
Upon skimming we found the kinds of products sold in these groups unveiled a number of websites being posted by these mods/ admins where the products were showcased. Enigmatic enough to compel speculations. Sampled are 2 websites repeatedly mentioned in posts.
But, a million-dollar question- Who benefits from this huge scam Ops?” At least two active websites, i.e., Fashionfloridausa and ournewdesigns are being powered/ backed by an e-commerce & print-on-demand (POD) company GearLaunch Inc.
GearLaunch is a San Francisco-based e-commerce and print-on-demand (POD) company founded by Thatcher Claflin Spring in 2013. Company’s Country Director, S.M. Belal Uddin, is a Bangladeshi citizen.
Per GearLaunch’s LinkedIn page, the majority of the company’s employees are Bangladeshi. GearLaunch has a deep interest in its ventures in Bangladesh. GL organized GearCon events in Dhaka (2022) & Sylhet (2024) for empowering Bangladeshi sellers to use the platform for global markets.
Not one, but multiple websites operate under the brand tag of GearLaunch brand tag. And all are involved in the same PoD merchandise selling model. They also have the same phone number, share the same address, and are powered by GearLaunch.
While skimming through the state pride groups infiltrated/operated by the scammers, several Bangladeshi profiles including that of Gear Launch employees, who were followed by the mods/ admins of these groups. Many of them have now locked their accounts.
Gear Launch doesn’t just aid in the business of these scammers but also provides training on how to sell products, paving way for more such scammers. GearLaunch employees release proper toolkits/ tutorials to organize these setups which later shape into scams.
Let’s talk economics!
Bangladesh’s garment industry expertise supports rapid, low-cost T-shirt & garments production. Bangladesh also dominates the global market with its Ready-Made Garments (RMG) exports surpassing India (3rd) & Vietnam (4th), accounting for 84.58% of the country’s total exports per 2023 data.
And these scams have not remained hidden from all. Several users who have either been a victims of their scam or have been closely following their activities have raised red flags against them. Unfortunately, due to an extremely low audience, their warnings fail to reach the masses.
The phone numbers, Facebook posts, and addresses mentioned on some of these scamming websites led us to 2-3 specific sets of addresses and contact numbers, which in turn connected to HUNDREDS more fake websites selling quilts, t-shirts, pet toys, home décor, etc.
This is not a one-off instance when this scam empire has been called out/ exposed. In 2018, CNN published an investigation wherein hundreds of Meta groups were used to create a fake event of Women’s March to exploit Americans’ interest in politics & protests in order to sell t-shirts.
There may be an unfathomable number of such groups on Meta and while hundreds of temporary websites flood the internet. The easiest way to identify them is through shared traits and common linkages highlighted by the Lab. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
The scale is staggering. While we exposed the Bangladeshi connection at the core of this scam, this investigation also opened scope to investigating similar operations pages running from Vietnam, Indonesia & African countries.
This nefarious network is taking people worldwide, especially Americans, for fools and need to be stopped before it pumps out more hard-earned money of innocent citizens.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @DisinfoLab on April 8, 2025, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
