HACKER Q&A
📣 dawiss1337

Need help stopping scam product


Hi Hackernews community,

I usually don't write or post things online, but yesterday evening my girlfriend showed me a celebrity advertising discounted wireless headphones and it seemed fishy to me. I need help people spreading the word to stop this.

The story was published on instagram by @kyliejenner (apparently a big celeberty in US), not sure how one can see it if not using the Instagram app, and the person is advertising "Nova Play" wireless headphones with 70% discount using a promo code. Nothing crazy here.

It started looking more fishy when I saw the website and it said free shipping worldwide and the headphones cost only 39$, and that they have 150k happy customers and the website had only 5 star reviews.

Then I tried googling for reviews of this product - nothing, not even a picture in google images. This is odd.

Then I checked the who.is of the domain name "nova-play.com" and it is registered on 31st of April, only 1 month ago. Interesting.

All of their social media pages have post not older that 4h of May, and in some social platforms like Instagram all the posts are made on 4th of May. Even more interesting.

Tried searching online the company name that is listed n their website and also didn't find anything. Something is not right.

At this stage it looks either they managed to get 150k customers in less than a month, or this whole product is fake.

I need the help of this community to either tell me that this is a real product, or help spreading a word about this fake product so that people don't get scammed.

Thank you all!


  👤 masonic Accepted Answer ✓

   it is registered on 31st of April
That would have made it immediately untrustworthy to me.

But seriously: this is a lucrative strategy now: marketing only by social media, relying on the poor critical thinking skills evident in most avid consumers of social media.

A great example is a new Facebook campaign by a company calling itself "Javapresse", saying their coffee in the "top 1%" of worldwide coffee and selling their beans for what turns out to be (if you do the actual math) for $24/lb. for blends of unstated origin. Their site has ~200 "reviews", every single one is "five stars", which somebody called them out on eventually. The founder even claimed to be "good friends" with Alfred Peet, who's been out of the industry for 30 years and dead for over a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_mi...