I have a real problem with Instagram ads.
When they first appeared in my timeline they weren't all that offensive. In fact, I ordered a phone case through one of them.
Said phone case never shipped, and the only way I was able to get my money back was through my credit card company.
Since then I've been very gun shy about buying anything via Instagram, but last fall I bought a T-shirt that actually shipped:
Maybe things were looking up. Still, that memory of the phone case stayed with me, and it was only reluctantly I ordered this ODBII reader about a month ago though an ad on Instagram. I'd had a reader a couple years ago but it's long since been displaced, and the ad showed some amazing software for my phone that looked really useful in monitoring what was going on in Anderson.
The first red flag was notification that it was shipping directly from China, but I'd ordered other things (admittedly through Amazon) that shipped from China and never had a problem. After a small delay, it finally arrived last week. It was as described in the Instagram ad except for one glaring omission: you need to jailbreak your phone to install the native software.
WTF?
First of all, I'm not going to jailbreak my phone, and even if I was willing to do that, I'm not going to jailbreak it and install an unknown piece of software from China. I'm an I.T. professional. Call me…cautious.
I wrote the company asking for a refund—knowing damn well I'd never hear back from them or end up with some lame excuses and this would probably be another credit card company refund. Additionally I starting going through my feed labeling every damn ad with "scam or misleading." I'd had enough.
Surprisingly, I received an email from the company this evening. They included a different QR code from the one printed on the box to obtain the software. The QR code took me to a web page with links (all to legitimate App Store offerings) for a dozen or more different apps that work with the hardware I purchased.
I haven't had time to check it out, and I'm not going to stop flagging the flood of advertising spam in my Instagram feed, but this may yet work out and I won't have to get my credit card company involved at all.