How to spot fake phone/gadget pages on Facebook

If you've been a Facebook or Instagram user for 5 minutes, no doubt you've come across a page selling phones/tablets or other gadgets where the price seems just a little too good to be true. It's 2025 and there still doesn't seem to be a decent way to avoid them, so here's a few ways you can spot the scam and warn others + report the page so others don't fall into the trap. 

1 - the biggest red flag is the prices are too good to be true.

Most of these scam pages are selling what they claim to be "brand new" - so your first step should be your local Apple stores' page to check the price and if you see it's more than 5% higher than the Facebook page, you know already it's a scam. The only other way these kinds of devices could have been procured for a price less than that is if they're stolen...either way, avoid. **Note, this is true for Brand New only, but legit sellers of used items can be selling them at quite a bit less, so this doesn't really apply

2 - they leave tell-tale signs in the images.

All these scam pages are doing is pulling photos from legit businesses but those businesses are almost NEVER in New Zealand! Look for telltale signs - a brand, a logo, a wall plug - anything that you can use to verify. A couple that I've seen recently have some photos of a logo of a business in South Sudan as well as one in Egypt - but are advertising as being in New Zealand. Another one I saw had a business card in the photo showing Santa Cruz, Kingston and St Elizabeth as locations - but all of these places are in Jamaica! Some of them, you can even see the wall sockets in the background. Everyone knows what a Kiwi wall socket looks like, so if these look different - run away

3 - language.

As multi-cultural as we are in NZ, the vast vast majority of our advertising is in English. Often on these pages they will show pictures of the device turned on but the language showing isn't English. I'm not talking about those home screens that rotate the word "hello" in lots of different languages - I mean they show screenshots of settings pages written in Dutch, Tagalog or Arabic. These should be a big red flag and you should avoid at all costs

4 - you have to ask them for the location and they will only DM it to you, rather than put it on their Facebook page.

Sure, it's possible for a business to not publish their physical address (we use a PO Box for example) but we make it clear that we are an online-only business. These kinds of places make it very confusing by saying "brand new products in-store now" or "come and see us for a great deal". Remember what I said in point 2 - these images are ripped off of other businesses and the same is true of the text. These scammers are lazy and never put in the effort to make themselves look legit

5 - generic names.

Phone/gadgets store NZ, or Phone Store Auckland, or NZ Gadgets are very generic names that are incredibly hard to verify. This is why they're used. If you pop the name in a search engine, you'll be greeted with thousands of results but you can guarantee that none will be from the store you're looking at on Facebook

6 - no website.

They have no web presence other than Facebook. You've also never seen them before they happened to show up in your feed. A legit business will have a presence in lots of places. Trustpilot, TradeMe, all kinds of directories, Google search results (or Google maps) - but especially, a website. And a proper website at that. If the store is something like gadgetshop.myshopify.com, probably another red flag and always best to avoid 

7 - real businesses with stupid prices for strange reasons.

There was one recently (but they've been around for years) from Harvey Norman selling iPhone 15s for $3 because they "were overstocked". Harvey Norman would never sell ANYTHING for $3 (come on, we've all been in those stores), so why would they start now with a device that you just happen to be in the market for?

If you happen across any examples of what I've written above, please report. To report them, on their Facebook page you'll find 3 dots in the upper-right corner - click that, click "Report Page" and report as a scam or fraud. 

I'm not going to plug our business this time around. I just happened to be on Facebook earlier today and came across a heap of these fake stores and it really irked me. So here we are - now you have some tools in your arsenal to deal with these. 

If I can help one person from being scammed, it's time well spent. Please don't fall victim to these and become another statistic for scam losses in 2025. Common sense always prevails!