“Worked at Costco for 3 Years and they trained us [to] hide this from members…” reads the text on a Facebook Reel that attracted close to 3 million views and featured a woman preparing a meal in a Costco uniform.
“When you know these secrets, you’ll NEVER shop the same again.”
The woman in the video is AI-generated, and one of her “secrets” is that people should visit costsaved[.]com and fill out a survey for a $700 gift card. The Reel is one of close to 8,000 videos identified by Indicator that use AI-generated personas purporting to be “insiders” or “fired employees” of major retail brands like Aldi, Dollar Tree, Home Depot, Publix, Sam's Club, Target, Trader Joe's, and Walmart. The videos generated at least 107 million views and directed viewers to sites that collect their personal information and promise a gift card that doesn’t exist.
An analysis of the accounts, their content, and the websites they promoted found that it’s a large-scale, coordinated affiliate marketing scheme with an unknown operator that uses AI tools at every step of the process.
Representatives from Aldi and Target told Indicator that promotions using their respective brands and names were illegitimate and unauthorized.
A spokesperson for Home Depot told Indicator “we take scams like these very seriously, and, unfortunately, they’re increasingly common.” She added that “we actively monitor for these types of websites so we can get them taken down.”
Meta removed all accounts we identified following our outreach under its policies on fraud, spam, and authentic identity representation. A spokesperson told Indicator that “this is an adversarial space, and we continue to invest in detecting and disrupting this type of activity on our platforms.”
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