OMG did Mahathir pass away?! Nope. A deep look at scummy Shopee links on FB
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The other day, we were scrolling through Facebook at work when we came across this post by a page called Hakidu:
Now, it didn’t specifically say who died, but if we’re talking about Malaysian politics, there’s only one person referred to as ‘Atok’, and that’s the former prime minister Mahathir Mohammad. Who, amazingly, is still alive at the time of publication despite being over 100 years old. We checked just in case.
Anyway, that was definitely fake news, but it gets weirder. Just for fun, we searched Facebook for posts that are similar to this one to find out who’s behind this slander, and apparently a whole bunch of pages posted pretty much the same thing, with the same format, and almost the exact same emojis, albeit at different dates.
Why are they doing this? Well, if you follow a bunch of media pages, you’ll probably be familiar with how they sometimes post a shocking statement with a link to their article or something in the comments. And all of these posts do have links in their comments that look as if they lead to the full story… but they’re all actually Shopee links in disguise.
Wah, what manner of scummery is this?!
We just gotta say that being on social media isn’t as fun anymore. It’s not enough that we have to deal with ads and AI slop, now we have to deal with Shopee also?
Except… this isn’t a new thing. It’s called Shopee Affiliate marketing, and you’ve probably remembered seeing a few posts that talk about random crap with a link to Shopee in the copy somewhere. Heck, some of you might even keep memes like these in your gallery just in case you run into one.
In fact, affiliates seem aware that people hate Shopee links also, as seen in this tutorial where an affiliate shares how to mask their affiliate links using tinyurl. The dead Mahathir post takes the whole not-letting-people-know-it’s-Shopee thing to the next level, straight out tricking people into clicking their links with no mention of the product whatsoever.
If you’re new to this, affiliates are essentially salesmen, and their job is to pull random passers-by on social media into a Shopee shop where the passer by will hopefully make a purchase. If the lured person buys something, the shop makes a sale, and the affiliates get a cut.
“The Shopee Affiliate Program is Shopee’s in-house program that allows you to use your social platforms to promote and recommend items that can be purchased on Shopee using a unique URL. You earn a commission for every successful purchase your followers make through the unique links you generate.”
– Shopee’s Affiliate Help Center, “What is Shopee Affiliate Program?”
So now it feels like it doesn’t make sense. Affiliates get a commission for every successful purchase, but how likely is it that someone who’s tricked into seeing a mini fan on Shopee will buy it?
Not very likely, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter because of the different shop commission mechanism. Essentially, as long as you’re logged on to Shopee on your device, Shopee will remember that you clicked on an affiliate link for the next seven days.
During this time, if you buy anything on Shopee from shops participating in the affiliate program, the affiliate whose link you last clicked on will get a cut. It doesn’t matter if it’s a different shop than the one promoted by the affiliate link you clicked on: both Shopee and the shop you bought from will pay commission to the affiliate.
So yeah, the affiliates behind these scummy pages are essentially leeches who made no effort to promote, yet still get paid by Shopee and the participating sellers for being annoying lowlifes who prey on our nearsighted, tech-blind, and sometimes horny senior citizens.
And we haven’t even gotten to the most annoying part about these people yet…
It’s like they all took the same yee yee ass masterclass on being online scumbags
At first, we wanted to see how many pages are doing this kind of crap. But by the time we reached 436 pages and our long-suffering wives were threatening to take our kids and leave us for someone less obsessed, we had to begrudgingly stop collecting the data despite knowing there’s a lot more out there.
However, despite there being over 400 pages in our sample, their dao can be boiled down to three strategies.
The first one, as seen in the example at the start, is by disguising their putrid, smelly, disgusting Shopee links as something less off-putting, like possible links to videos, gossip sites, or mildly entertaining parodies of reputable news sites’ URLs.
These links are most likely some sort of URL shortening service like tinyurl, bit.ly, ty.ly or klik.vip, and they’ll eventually redirect to Shopee product pages.
The second way we’ve seen is manipulating the thumbnail to their links so that it looks like a legit news site thumbnail.
However, if you hover your cursor over the thumbnail or long press the thumbnail on mobile, you’ll see that the link actually leads somewhere else, but ultimately to Shopee.
The third way, and perhaps the most commonly seen in our sample, is disguising their link as Facebook UI elements. For example, this post looks like it has a gallery, but it’s actually just one single image that’s also a direct link to Shopee. So clicking on it won’t show you the size of the feller who slapped this AI woman, but it will show you a product on Shopee.
Interestingly, they also (badly) imitate Facebook’s ‘see more’ function. Like in the image above, when a post gets too long, Facebook will shorten it and place a ‘more’ button that shows the rest of the text. These affiliates have been buying .re domains and tacking them halfway through their sentences like so.
We’ve found no less than 20 variations of these, and some of them seems like it’s made for that annoying affiliate friend who wants to try this out so you give them one just to make them shut up. Like, who the hell is clicking on 5ee-m0.re?
The baits these pages used are also as varied as their hooks. We’ve got ragebaits, news stories, celebrity news, the occasional NSFW posts, and perhaps perplexingly, condolences like this one.
We checked, by the way, and it’s about as real as the savings you get from one of those 25% off Shopee VIP vouchers capped at RM2. There are no YouTubers with those names, and you can get that picture for free on PNGtree where it says watercolor but is obviously AI generated… this is such a dystopian paragraph.
Anyways, we won’t go in too deep about all the other horrors we’ve seen, but if you have a slow day at work we’ve compiled a list of pages doing this in this datasheet here, plus the see more variations in tab 2. Just log yourselves out of Shopee before clicking those links.
With so much being the same, you’d have to wonder…
Are all these people connected somehow?
Not all, as far as we can tell, but some of them are.
For starters, we’ve found pages that seems linked in our sample. As in, they post the same content, at roughly the same times, bearing the same links. We call these pages clusters, and the biggest clusters we’ve found are at least 51 and 44 pages big, which we’ll call Clusters A and B, respectively.
We said ‘at least’ because we’re sure there are still other pages that follow the same posting schedules as these ones, but they’re not in our sample.
Anyway, before we explain further, you need to know something about those affiliate links. If you have the misfortune to click into one on desktop, you can actually tell which affiliate it belongs to because their 11-digit Affiliate ID will be part of the URL, in the utm_source part after utm_medium=affiliates.
Knowing this, we willingly clicked on a week’s worth of links from pages in Cluster A, which tend to make use of only two variations of ‘see more’ links: siee-mo.re, and ssee-mo.re. Both of these links are owned by the same affiliate (same Affiliate ID), which is 12344800065.
Interestingly, this ID wasn’t found in any of the other clusters as far as we can tell, suggesting that this affiliate works alone. Yes, we wasted months clicking on as many Shopee links from as many pages as we can.
In comparison, we found eight unique affiliate IDs from pages in Cluster B, suggesting that this is more of a collaboration. Another thing we noticed about pages from this cluster is that if you look at their Page Transparency sections, all but one of the 44 pages are jointly managed by accounts registered in the Philippines.
Outside of this cluster, we’ve found several other pages which had this peculiarity, and they belonged to three other clusters which we’ll call Clusters C, D, and E.
Despite belonging to different clusters, we’ve found connections when comparing their Affiliate IDs, i.e. some clusters post links belonging to the same affiliates, suggesting that this is a bigger operation.
While we haven’t checked everything, we can conclude that instead of one big mastermind, there are several separate clusters of affiliates pushing their Shopee slop onto the innocent netizens of Malaysian Facebook, and each of these affiliates seem to be connected to several pages at the same time, so to weed each one out might take more time than atok has left.
Which brings us to the next question…
Isn’t this breaking some sort of rule or law?!
Perhaps surprisingly, not the law. You’d think reporting these Shopee links to MCMC would do something, but when we called them up to ask, apparently it’s not illegal to use social media to scam people into clicking Shopee links. Also, the MCMC can only do something if the issue at hand is related to hate speech, particularly involving the 3R (race, religion, royalty), as well as obscene stuff like porn.
Other offences are handled by different departments, like if it’s an unregulated health scam we should have gone to KKM, if it’s sedition we should make a police report, or if it’s a financial scam we should reach out to either the Companies Commission, Bank Negara Malaysia, KPDN, Securities Commission, or the police.
You can check this link to see the full list of issues and who’s responsible, but tl;dr, reporting these scammy Shopee affiliates to the authorities will probably at best get you an official statement and not much else.
So with the authorities out of the picture, we’ll have to turn to Shopee themselves. Now, doing all these scummy stuff actually goes against Shopee’s terms and conditions for the affiliate program, as they fall under clickbait/deceptive/irrelevant content.
However, the penalties aren’t that deterring. For a first offence (read: first time they get reported), they get a *gasp* warning… and if they get reported again within three months they will get banned for an indescribably agonizing ONE WEEK.
The heaviest penalty they dish out is a six months ban, which happens if the affiliate gets reported five times within a month or something.
But if three months pass without another report, then the penalty counter is reset back to square one. So for an affiliate to get crippled, you’d need at least four other people to bring them down within a month.
But even if you do find four friends to do this, you’d better hope they’re affiliates as well, because according to the report form found deep in their social media community guidelines page, you’d need to be an affiliate yourself to report.
Wah, it’s like the system is stacked against the people who are supposed to be tricked into clicking the links. We reached out to Shopee about this a few weeks ago, they said they’ll do something about it over the phone, but the form still requires you to be an affiliate to report when we wrote this, so…
Anyway, with Shopee seemingly not in a hurry to put a stop to this, we’re back to what MCMC suggested for us to do in the first place: bring it up with the platform, aka Facebook. There are indeed grounds to report these pages, because most, if not all of their postings fall under Spam under Meta’s Community Standards.
These include:
- Cloaking, aka hiding Shopee links under a different thumbnail,
- Misleading links, where they promise news but deliver Shopee pages,
- Deceptive redirect behavior, where users unwillingly got redirected to Shopee, and
- Deceptive platform functionality, where they disguise Shopee links as Facebook’s interface, like galleries and the ‘see more’ thing.
So while we can wait for Shopee to maybe outlaw redirecting or masking their links, or for the authorities to go through the whole rigmarole of drafting a new law against misleading people like this, or maybe even for Meta to improve their spam detectors, who knows how long that will take.
A check on some of these pages showed that they’ve been doing this for at least as far back as 2022, so it’s safe to say that if we wait these affiliates will just keep on making bank. So if something is to happen now, the best course of action for us seems to be to report these pages to Facebook and have them taken down.
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