After The Sunday Times exposé (October 20) of hundreds of fake listings on Amazon and Meta of the sold out Martha Brook advent calendar, Amazon has confirmed it has taken down 900 listings of the calendar worldwide.
Owner of Martha Brook, Martha Keith was horrified to find out that scammers were advertising her sold out advent calendar on Amazon, Meta and hundreds of fake websites, using her videos and photos, takings orders and delivering nothing. After hitting a brick wall with the official avenues, she contacted The Sunday Times, which undertook a thorough investigation, exposing the extent of the scam.
Since the article appeared in The Sunday Times, Amazon has confirmed it has removed more than 900 listings of the advent calendar worldwide. Martha Brook is working on removing the many eBay listings and still working on the Meta ads, which are proving hard to get down.
Martha told her followers on Instagram: “We’ve taken legal action against all the fraud websites we are aware of thanks to your [the customers] reporting and have got more than 100 listings taken down. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau and Action Fraud have been in touch and we now have a case open with them.”
She has a plea for all followers of Martha Brook and anyone who sees scam Meta adverts: “The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau say they can put pressure on Meta to take the ads down, but only if we have a link to the ad. I know this is really hard but if you see one please can you try send us a link/send it through our form?”
If you have been affected by this scam, you report it to www.actionfraud.police.uk using the reference code NFRC241006958957.
The news of the Martha Brook scam comes at the same time as many UK greeting card publishers are finding their card designs being copied and sold without permission on the Chinese-owned Temu online marketplace.
Dandelion Stationery’s Jo Wilson told StationeryNews.net’s sister title, PGBuzz.net said she is “quite astounded” at the number of items on Temu where no attempt has been made to change the designs: “It looks to us like images have been grabbed from various sources and those images have just been imposed on to cards by Chinese companies selling via Temu.
“There is a process for getting items removed but it’s time consuming and tedious – two of us here spent pretty much the whole of Thursday and Friday trawling Temu and reporting copies. We got an email on Sunday telling us items had been removed, but then on Monday they reappeared under a different seller. It’s just so frustrating but also soul destroying.”
McDaniels Law has now stepped up to assist in the battle against the Temu copycats, taking it on pro bono with Bold & Bright and Dandelion Stationery as a case study.
