Summary
- “Brushing” scams involve sellers making fake purchases using your personal details so they can leave themselves positive reviews.
- Your personal data can be compromised in a number of ways, but once it’s leaked, it cannot be retrieved.
- Learn to spot fake reviews, check for unauthorized purchases on your shopping accounts, and ignore unsolicited parcels.
Ever wondered how some of the awful products listed on online shopping sites are getting great reviews? It could be “brushing”: a scam that uses your personal details to leave reviews for things you never purchased, to trick others into doing so.
What Is a “Brushing” Scam?
It’s mail day, and the postman drops off a pile of parcels on your doorstep… And there’s something extra. Something you didn’t order. It’s a cheap widget with no additional details or an invoice, so you shrug it off and go on with your life.
Chances are, you’ve just been part of a “brushing” scam.
A brushing scam is when a seller purchases their own product from an online e-commerce platform like Amazon or eBay using your name and delivery address. Once there’s a record of a purchase and a delivery, they can leave a glowing review using your details that appears 100% legitimate. The seller may not have even sent you the actual product they’ll leave a review for (especially if it’s expensive). You’ll just receive whatever junk they had within reach to make the padded envelope look occupied, so it isn’t rejected at the post office.
This may seem like a lot of effort for a single review, but its prevalence means that it must work. If the initiator of the scam is launching a new product, it can make it appear popular, and let them extoll its virtues in the reviews and try and attract real customers. If they’re less honorable, they’re selling cheap tacky items with misleading listings that they want to lend legitimacy to using your name.
So, in a sense, you aren’t the actual victim in this scam (the people who actually pay for the product based on “your” review are). You’re just a tool used by the scammer to “brush up” their reviews.
Brushing Scams Are an Indication That Your Personal Info Is Compromised
While brushing scams can be done using stolen credentials for your online shopping accounts (you can quickly check if this is the case by monitoring your purchase history), this is usually unnecessary on the part of the scammer. It’s much easier for them to just create a new account using your personal details that have previously leaked online.
This could have happened at any time, even years ago. Databases of people’s personal info are available for sale online, and a valid name and address are all the scammer needs to pull off a successful brushing scam. There’s nothing you can do about this either. Once your details are out there, they’re out there.
What To Do if You Think Your Info Is Being Used To Scam Others
You should already be following day-to-day cybersecurity and privacy best practices, but receiving unsolicited parcels is a good excuse to go and tighten up your security a bit: update your old passwords, check for suspicious activity on your accounts, and enable multi-factor authentication wherever it’s supported.
Turning down anonymous parcels is increasingly difficult, as more and more trade is done online. It’s hard to know whether a parcel being handed to you is something you actually ordered, and the postman isn’t going to wait on the doorstep while you try and figure it out, especially if your morning coffee is yet to kick in. As for the fake reviews, you can try and hunt them down online and report them to discourage your address from being used in the future, but there is no guarantee this will work.
Returning the parcel is also usually out of the question. Interacting with scammers is a good way to get them to focus on you, which you certainly don’t want. If the parcel was addressed to you, and the law allows it, you may as well hold on to the item, and if no one comes asking for it after a while, take ownership or throw it out.
Just be aware that whatever you receive is probably the cheapest object within reach of the scammer that they could jam in a padded envelope. If it’s something that could pose any danger (like electrical items), or food or cosmetics that may be counterfeit, or anything else that could pose a potential health or safety risk, you should probably send it straight to landfill.
What To Do if You Don’t Get What You Ordered
If you suspect you’re a victim of brushing, having ordered something that didn’t live up to the expectations its reviews set, you should try and return it. When making purchases, watch out for signs of fake reviews and fake AI-generated products. Amazon will also warn you if an item is returned frequently.
There are whole categories of products you should be wary of purchasing online due to the elevated risks of scams and even physical harm from defective products.
How To Keep Your Personal Data Secure, and What To Do When It’s Inevitably Leaked
Privacy is a diminishing resource for everyone, everywhere: whether you consent or not, your details are out there. Every time you make a purchase, you’re giving your details to the seller, and their employees that handle orders and pack your items will have access to them. Your contact details exist in countless databases that could be leaked at any point (from social media, governments, your hairdresser, and other organizations), and even if you figure out who leaked it, the damage is already done.
None of this is worth worrying about—it’s inevitable. All you can do is try and maintain good digital hygiene to reduce the amount of new information that can leak, and be vigilant for unexpected charges to your accounts, or activity on your social media.
