The age-old lesson of social media: Your data is valuable and people will go to great lengths, even pay money to operations like Facebook to get it. So, if it looks too good to be true—you already know the rest of the sentence.
Have you noticed the “sincere” and informative videos in the “reels” feeds on Facebook telling you how you can save a ton of money on your auto insurance? On top of this there’s the “personal” stories of how an obscure company no one has ever heard of before supposedly has people paying $39 a month for their full auto coverage? If these items sound like complete BS, go to the head of the class.
These posts and videos are click bait advertising operations. And they have been pretty successful in scamming people into going to various sites to “get a quote” on car insurance.
However, no one is getting insurance from these sites. They don’t sell insurance. What they do sell is information people have given them to other companies which are going to use to target them with marketing messages.
Here’s an example. One such site called is CivilCarCoverage.com. Their displayed link on Facebook has a little statement “584,921 Approved.” This is supposed to make you feel like you have a good chance of getting a “deal.”
But when you dig down a bit on their website—which is designed to make you disinterested in doing just that—it has a statement on their “terms of service” page:
“You understand and agree that CivilCarCoverage is not an insurance provider and is not the creditor for or issuer of, any of the products featured on the Site. Any products or services advertised at this site or made available to you by any of our partners after you leave the CivilCarCoverage site, are by and remain the sole responsibility of the respective product vendors and service providers.”
So who or what the hell did you give your data over to? You just freely gave it to a company that is getting paid for that data from numerous sources, only one of which will be car insurance providers. And when you get their actual quotes you will realize you’ve been scammed. And of course this will get worse and worse when you get a ton of spam and phone calls from other companies you’ve never heard of and have no interest in.
What’s even nastier about this is that two of the videos that I just saw were labeled as sponsored which means that Facebook is getting paid to show them. And of course, Facebook’s AI-based approval system verified the validity of the ads—probably by making sure the payment source was valid.
The image at the top of this post is from the page of a person posting “stories” about how useful the Civil Car Coverage site was for him. A quick perusal of the page shows things that are designed to make him look like a normal, everyday guy. It has simplistic Bible memes, posts showing some military guys and how we should thank them and then meme after meme about how car insurance agents are screwing you. In other words, the page is a carefully crafted propaganda vehicle.
Newman’s—if that is even his name—stories talk about how insurance agents and brokers are keeping the lion’s share of your payments and going “direct” can save you staggering amounts of money. This is a bald-faced lie. Ask anyone who has ever been in or around the insurance business. (My wife worked in auto insurance for many years, so I’m not just surmising this.)
This is a repeat of the age-old lesson of social media. Your data is valuable. People will go to great lengths, even pay money to operations like Facebook to get it. Because they can right turn around and make a profit by selling it over and over to other companies. In the end you get to pay for it with your time, fending off sales people and spam emails.
It is wise to be on constant alert about “offers” that are too good to be true. They simply aren’t. And that never changes.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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