I’ve been trying to sell my old iPhone and AirPods on Facebook Marketplace. Since I wanted them gone quickly, I priced them a bit lower than similar listings but Facebook instantly flagged them as “counterfeit.”
I thought maybe the issue was my photos, so I relisted with clearer pictures… same result. Every appeal just gets an automated rejection with no real explanation.
Now I’m getting warnings that I’m “at risk of losing access to Marketplace.”
It honestly feels like their AI is using a hard, oversimplified rule: “iPhone 8 listed for $80? Must be counterfeit.”
You're right not most. The thing is the barrier to entry is so low now, people don't need "domain knowledge" because there is an "easily packaged path" now a days. These black/gray market peptides are directly advertised on social media not only directly from companies selling them but it has given rise to a whole crop of influencers known as "peptide educators". They lower the barrier to entry, simplify how to do it all and offer servicing essentially coaching people to take peptides.
There is Facebook groups with thousands of 50 year old moms taking gray market peptides, not just top 1% peptide-using bodybuilders. My example of peptide using bodybuilders was about the anecdotal safety of peptides. The barrier to entry previously was ALOT higher, you practically had to either contact a middleman in China and wire money to a random bank account overseas or buy it from a steroid drug dealer, now a days there is thousands of online storefronts that accept credit card and ship domestically that come with visual graphic instructions on how to do everything.
I'm sure when the New York Times writes a big piece about how gray market peptides have become a huge thing in the Fitness social media space, others will recognize it is growing and growing fast.
People regularly test black/gray market peptides in labs for both heavy metals and sterility (USP 61 or 71 I believe). The production of something like Testosterone/anabolic steroids is completely different has higher risks of contamination than peptides which use recombinant DNA or solid phase peptide synthesis.
That video is literally about anabolic steroids not peptides. Not to mention there was 0 testing labs in 2012 that users could send their items to, to get tested while there is many now a days. Back then in 2012 unless you had a friend at a University lab that knew analytical chemistry you were out of luck to get anything tested.
You aren't wrong about a lab in China cutting corners, having quality issues and low quality control standards but people don't care if they see 10,000+ people using peptides for decades without a single complaint about infection or real problems.
"is producing something that normally costs such a high amount" the cost has very little to do with the chemicals themself, the cost is about recouping R&D costs and having a 90% profit margin.
A 2 year supply of Ozempic (Semaglutide) lyophilized in sterile vials is ~$120USD (300mg of Semaglutide, 2.4mg a week at max dose so 125 weeks) on the black/gray market and that's with at least 2 middlemen making a profit so realistically the cost might be closer to $70USD?. Anyone can pay to get it HPLC tested to confirm the quantity, purity, sterility etc not to mention people (bodybuilders) have been using gray market peptides for 10+years and you never hear any stories about something going wrong (Things go wrong with oil based steroids for bodybuilders commonly not peptides in BAC water).
Meanwhile that same ~$120USD 2 year supply of Ozempic is $8400 in Europe, $9600 in Canada and $24000 in the USA.
There is a high level of server load for this as well, not only placing these fake characters but making them move and act like real human players so they are believed and then culling them (server would cull them not the client to be clear because how would the client know to cull them without a flag?) only right before they are visible while taking account of lag (ping), interp, packet loss etc..
I definitely could see someone games doing this as a one-off to just catch specific cheaters they are suspicious of to confirm they are cheating (Many 3rd party anti-cheats in counter strike and the 1st party valorant anti-cheat do manual bans based on replay reviews) but also since they already do fog of war someone with wall hack seeing an enemy player pop in for 1 frame before disappearing would make it not effective on a wide scale.
Sending copies of fake character data isn't a thing because there eventually has to be a flag that tells the client to not render that character that the client hack could simply read.
It should be clear that servers already do not trust the client, they do many checks hence you don't see teleportation hacks in games like Counter strike or Valorant. There used to be cheats in the counter strike games like "nospread" where you could have 100% pixel perfect aiming but that was because the the client was trusted however now in most games with some randomness in bullet spray patterns the random seed is different between the client and server so something like "nospread" are no longer possible.
You might be stumbling upon "fog of war" that is not sending data to a client unless the enemy player is close to visible which is a thing. It's widely used and I'd say effective in MOBA/MMORPG/RTS games however in FPS games fog of war is many times more computationally expensive which matters at the scale of games these days. It has been a thing for a long time in counter strike with server plugins like "SMAC anti wall hack" or "server side occlusion culling" however the implementations sometimes have not been perfect and require significantly stronger servers. https://github.com/87andrewh/CornerCullingSourceEngine
Riot games also implements fog of war at scale in Valorant and has a blog post covering some of the issues they overcame. One thing you can see the gif at the end of the blog post, even though fog of war is effective it is only effective in reducing the effectiveness of wall hacks and wall hacks still provide a significant advantage.
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
It honestly feels like their AI is using a hard, oversimplified rule: “iPhone 8 listed for $80? Must be counterfeit.”