Shell paid the exorbitant worth of $39.99 for 2 SafeMasks (comparable respirators normally promote for $0.75 on-line) and felt higher — till days glided by and so they by no means arrived. He thought he’d been scammed. He referred to as a quantity for buyer assist listed on his bill, and the one that answered instructed a unique story.
“He mentioned there’s been such a requirement for these masks, as you may think about, that they’re like a month behind. He mentioned, ‘You most likely will not get yours for one more month,’” Shell mentioned. “I made a really, very crude joke: ‘I hope I am alive by then.’”
Over the previous two months, governments and hospitals have struggled to buy sufficient private protecting gear. As individuals realized the lethal risk posed by the coronavirus, they too started looking for masks.
Into that local weather of worry and uncertainty got here SafeMask, an overpriced, initially unauthorized, and misleadingly marketed masks that could be essentially the most promoted piece of security gear on the web. It’s earned probably hundreds of thousands of {dollars} because of the oldest on-line gross sales channel: electronic mail.
SafeMask is offered by Ricardo Jorge Pereira de Sousa Coelho, a Portuguese millionaire with a set of supercars and corporations and residences in Malta, the Seychelles, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Estonia. In an interview with BuzzFeed Information, he denied deceptive individuals and mentioned he simply offered the masks.
However, starting in February, not less than 1 billion emails have been despatched selling SafeMask, in accordance with an investigation by BuzzFeed Information and the Institute for Information, Democracy & Politics at George Washington College. Many of those emails focused American conservatives and have been despatched to mailing lists owned by a trio of actual property flippers who function web sites like RepublicanPost.internet, RightOnNews.com, and LeapFrogAmerica.com.
SafeMask clients mentioned they have been led to consider the masks was reusable, which it isn’t. SafeMask fee websites displayed a picture labeled as an N95 respirator despite the fact that consumers have been shipped one thing else. SafeMask emails additionally promoted European-made FFP2 respirators earlier than they have been accepted on the market in the US.
After this story was revealed, a brand new declare about SafeMask emerged. A file that de Sousa offered to BuzzFeed Information as proof his masks have been licensed for the European market appeared to have been solid, in accordance with Apave, the French testing firm named on the doc.
“We in contrast this certificates with our inside data and we discovered quite a few discrepancies which lead us to consider that this certificates has not been issued by our providers and that it’s almost certainly a falsified doc,” Tatiana Martin, a industrial assistant in Apave’s testing and certification heart, instructed BuzzFeed Information.
Via his lawyer, de Sousa didn’t return a request for remark.
As worry grew and the dying toll mounted, so did the depth of SafeMask’s advertising and marketing. In March, Fb, Google, Amazon, and different platforms banned masks advertisements, and authorities within the US, Canada, and elsewhere enacted zero tolerance insurance policies for worth gouging and false claims. In the meantime, deceptive SafeMask emails have been blasted by the hundreds of thousands. SafeMask advertisements have been despatched to electronic mail lists on survivalist blogs, tactical gear shops, and Horoscope.com. They have been promoted on partisan news sites and posted as a press release on MarketWatch.com and on a Brazilian Facebook page with near 1 million followers. Different SafeMask emails have been extra indiscriminate, and located their approach into the inboxes of individuals like Shell. Bulk emailers started utilizing the .icu area, evoking “intensive care unit” and creating the impression that the masks have been from medical services. (The .icu suffix, accepted in 2018, stands for “I see you.”)
Neil Schwartzman, government director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, instructed BuzzFeed Information coronavirus masks spam is among the many most malicious spam he’s ever seen. “Everyone is terrified at this level, and if I supply a miracle remedy it’s extra prone to be accepted now than ever earlier than. Individuals are leveraging that worry and cashing in on it.”
