If you’ve been looking at your Facebook feed recently, you’ve probably seen sponsored posts of Marshall Philippines cutting prices by 80% for their most popular models. Only they’re not, as there is no massive sale and this isn’t the official page of Marshall Philippines. It’s a page run by god knows who, and are probably trying to sell you fake, Marshall branded products in the Philippines.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t necessitate a whole article calling out Meta, but the fact that this modus operandi has been running for months, and has now upped the ante by creating fake pages of popular digital creators like Mary Bautista and Vince Domingo of Unbox Diaries to try and sell the illusion that what they’re selling are legit products. Speaking as someone who knows both of these people personally, I can tell you that they have no affiliation with the people running these pages. Not that they needed to say anything – these badly photoshopped images already speak volumes about the scam they’re trying to perpetrate.

That particular state of affairs would be bad by itself, but it’s compounded by Meta’s absolute inaction to the complaints of the people who control and sell Marshall products in the Philippines, Digits. The marketing team behind the real Marshall Philippines has tried reporting the fake page multiple times already to no avail. It’s gotten so bad that even people I know have been burned by the seemingly good deals on the “products” that they’re hawking, and they’re very obviously not legit. People have been complaining on the official Marshall Philippines Facebook page since May of this year, possibly even longer.

Yet despite looking very much like a scam page, Meta has not disabled or removed them from their platform. Instead, the company has been taking advertising money from them and has allowed several sponsored posts from them (and the pages that have impersonated Mary and Vince) through their supposed rigorous advertising standards. It’s rich that Meta, who required us to change the wording of a legitimate, above-board post three times (and disabling a team member’s capability to boost posts for a month), doesn’t apply the same scrutiny to pages like the one we’re talking about. Very cool Meta. Very cool. Maybe because these pages have been spending a lot of advertising money to keep the scam going, targeting vulnerable and not very technology-literate people like the elderly. Please tell us it ain’t so Meta.

As of press time, Meta hasn’t done anything to these fake pages as of yet and they’re still running, so it falls on readers like you to spread the word that these pages ARE NOT LEGIT and a complete scam. No business will sell products at 80% off unless it’s a fire sale or some special occasion, and especially not newly released products that aren’t even a year old.

Lastly, we hope that Meta finally does the right thing and takes down the pages of these scammers. With money getting tighter every day because of inflation and other factors, it just doesn’t sit right with me that the biggest social media platform in the world is allowing pages like these to continue to operate unabated.