La Voz de Galicia – June 13, 2025 →
I fell for the trap like an idiot. And I even have Instagram limited to 15 minutes a day. It was an ad for the face cream I usually use, the one I always buy online. I saw they were offering a 20% discount, and since I needed to restock, off I went—to the Instagram link, which took me to the website where I bought my cream. But the moment I confirmed the payment, a strange message popped up congratulating me and saying my order was already on its way… And I thought, but I just bought it! Then I checked my email for the confirmation message, and that’s when I realized I had just fallen, like a fool, for one of those scams where they clone the website of the original product, making you believe you’re on the official page, when in fact you’re just handing over money to a scammer who’s never going to send the product. And even though what I spent (about thirty euros) wasn’t a fortune, the frustration of having fallen for it, and the feeling of helplessness, stayed with me for a few days…
There have always been scams and deceptions. Always. But I think nowadays, in the digital world, it’s harder than ever to see them coming. And even if one is careful and well aware that these things happen, the truth is it’s very easy to fall for one— it takes nothing more than giving in to a momentary impulse. Social media is what it is. Maybe it was born with the premise of connecting us to one another, with the idea of sharing and building community, but the reality is that what it really does is steal our attention (and our privacy), sell us products, and manipulate our thinking with a worldview skewed by an algorithm that’s increasingly powerful, increasingly dangerous.
