TikTok Users Are Recommending a Watch from Freshest Vibes, But It's Sketchy
TikTok users are recommending the Limited Edition CEO Watch available on Freshest Vibes, but is the online retailer actually a scam?
Feb. 1 2021, Published 12:35 p.m. ET
The internet is filled with people who are hoping to make some quick money off of other people's desire for a good deal. Scams are only becoming more common as social media allows products that are unverified to go viral before anyone has actually seen what they look like. That seems to be what happened with Freshest Vibes, a website that claims to offer a "CEO Watch Limited Edition" for just $119.99.
Is the CEO Watch Limited Edition sale a scam?
The CEO Watch that's for sale on Freshest Vibes went viral after users saw TikTok posts recommending it as a high-quality product at a fairly affordable price point. After the posts went somewhat viral, many of them were deleted, and some users who had ordered products on the recommendation of these posts began to worry that they were actually a scam.
Although there's no definitive evidence that Freshest Vibes, which has the URL freshestvibes.com, isn't a legitimate business, there's plenty to suggest that the company is actually a scam. The URL was registered just three months ago, and the company claims to operate out of Colorado but has only listed a P.O. Box for their address. As a result, users might expect to receive unsatisfactory items in their orders or nothing at all.
What should you do if you've ordered from Freshest Vibes?
Although the company appears to be a scam, there are plenty of people who have already fallen victim to it. Those who have already ordered something from the site should contact their financial institutions or banks to have the transaction canceled and their money refunded before it disappears forever. Unfortunately, if the transaction has already gone through, you may not be able to recover your money easily.
What you can do, however, is help other people avoid falling victim to the same scam by posting about it on your social media channels. Scams that are widely shared have become an enormous problem on sites like Facebook, but now it seems like TikTok may have to find ways to deal with a new wave of users who join the platform to trick others into spending their money.
For a lot of its life thus far, TikTok has been seen as a nicer alternative to many of the social media platforms that millennials grew up with. As it continues to evolve, though, the company is likely to be plagued with many of the same problems that other platforms have already been wrestling with for years. Scams are just one of many issues the platform has come up against more recently.
In one story from 2020, scammers made more than $500,000 by promoting fake apps on TikTok. The apps wound up being downloaded more than 2 million times by users across the planet, and those who had posted about it made enormous sums after they helped it go viral. The rules of the internet still apply to TikTok. Users should be careful what they trust, and if a deal seems like it's too good to be true, that's because it probably is.