A viral TikTok jewelry scam is sucking in customers with 'revenge' videos by creators who say they too were tricked
- A network of websites is tricking customers into buying jewelry they think is an amazing deal.
- The scam is powered by videos purporting to give buyers a secret discount code in an act of revenge.
"Storytime," a young woman announced to the camera, like thousands of TikTokers do every day. "How I got fired, and how I'm gonna get revenge."
She described being unceremoniously sacked by a jewelry brand called Trugala after her boss caught her shopping on company time.
"So go crazy guys," she said. "I did not deserve this."
Her payback would be sharing a discount code to slash the cost of Trugala's premium jewelry to $0, with only shipping to pay.
The code was real, but her story was a lie. An Insider investigation found that she was one of many pulled into a vast scam that went viral after customers realized they had been fooled.
Face of a scam
The woman in the video — Stacey Wilson — told Insider she was hired on the freelance platform Upwork and got $30 to make the video.
She never worked for Trugala, was never fired, and had never bought anything from the site or even seen the products.
But people believed her story — and bought Trugala's jewelry using her code.
When the products arrived, they looked nothing like what was on the site. Instead of premium pieces, they got plasticky, costume jewelry worth next to nothing.
As buyers realized they had been scammed, they turned on both Trugala and Wilson, its unwitting public face.
"It was really, really bad," Wilson told Insider of the backlash that followed. "It took me into this dark hole. It really put a toll on my mental health."
Wilson thought her video would go out on Trugala's brand pages, marked as an ad.
Instead, the video — and a second she recorded for $45 — were posted on TikTok hundreds of times via burner accounts.
Some gave away her real name, like Stacywilson889, or tweaked it a little, like Stacywashington889, Stacerebe, and Stacybrown883. There was also stacybabeyy, queenofnyc899, and citygirl3392, all with Wilson's face as a profile picture.
'Please, take this all down'
Wilson didn't realize this was happening until her friend sent her a TikTok where she was derided as a manipulative scammer.
"My face was everywhere. Everywhere. They made over a hundred pages of me," Wilson told Insider. "I just remember shaking and I was like, please, take this all down."
Trugala is one of a handful of website stores that operate in the same way. They advertise rings, necklaces, and bracelets, most in excess of $100.
Insider's reporting connected the operation to two businessmen on Long Island, New York, though while one admitted his involvement with similar jewelry companies, he denied setting up Trugala specifically, describing it as a "copycat."
With a short code from the videos, like "MAD100," the price drops to zero. But everything comes with a shipping fee.
Insider tested the method on five similar sites: Trugala, Sevatti, Deraldi, Vulosa, and Mazalti. All accepted a discount code from associated TikToks, and charged nothing but a shipping fee, which increased depending on how many items were in the basket.
One customer was TikToker Myra Solana. She told Insider she saw a video at 3 a.m. and fell for it — thinking it was worth the risk to get seemingly hundreds of dollars' worth of jewelry for $16.
"I didn't look it up beforehand and thought, oh, I'm getting a great deal," Solana told Insider. "I'm always out to get a good deal, so I was like, heck yeah."
Solana didn't get any receipt or confirmation of her order, which made her suspicious. Then she found slews of forum posts and videos calling it out as a scam. Solana immediately canceled her credit card out of fear her information would be stolen, and then made a post of her own warning other people.
"They are trying so hard to be authentic," Solana said. "But if you look hard enough, you can definitely tell that it's a fake page grasping for real people's attention for this elaborate scam."
An army of fakes
Solana's jewelry took about a month to show up, she said, but was "definitely not a hundred dollar's worth."
Instead it was "something that you would get at Party City," she said. Insider found items matching what Solana was sent on discount sites like Ali Express.
On TikTok, dozens of other creators shared similar tales.
Wilson was horrified when she figured out what was going on. She Googled the name of the person that hired her, "Antonio Monty," and nothing came up.
"I'm like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, how did I get into this?" she said. "Like, I'm a college graduate, I do my research about everything. Like, how did this happen?"
Wilson sent Insider transcripts of her conversations. Halfway through their interactions, Monty's display name changed without explanation to Gregory Ratner.
Wilson asked for the videos to be pulled in messages sent from mid-April to mid-May. Monty at first defended the approach as a "business strategy" and "the most authentic" way to use the footage.
He said it "would be a scam if no jewelry was sent at all," seeming to think the sales were legitimate as long as customers received a product, however poor.
Monty agreed in the chat to stop uploading the videos — but Wilson found more. Some deleted accounts came back, she said. She told Monty she was suffering bad anxiety.
"I dont like the attacks I'm getting in the comments," she wrote to him, "please this is affecting me mentally please take it down."
"I didn't intend for this to affect you mentally and I feel terrible that it did," Monty said, though he later seemed annoyed and passed on the blame.
"For the fourth time I'm not home till Thursday," he said once, saying his "team" was at fault rather than him.
"Someone else is covering for me the past three weeks," he said. "They must not have got the memo."
Wilson told Insider she was considering legal action. She also informed TikTok, which removed most videos of her, though Insider could still find one as of June 8.
Insider spoke with three other creators, all hired through Upwork for similar gigs.
Ellison Scarborough said Sevatti hired her to make 10 videos a week in November 2022, and she was thrilled at the easy money. But when people left comments about it on her real TikTok account, where she has a fairly big following, she "freaked out."
"I wish that I could obviously delete all the videos that were posted with my face," she told Insider. "Because each video that I post now that gets a lot of views, people could put two and two together for sure."
$40, with a sting in the tail
McKenzie Hedrick was another, who accepted $40 to record a video for Vuolsa in November 2022. The wording of the ad matched those for the other sites.
"We are looking for an actress that can create a TikTok style advertisement for our jewelry brand, using the scripts we provide," it said.
"This will start as a one-time project, but if the ad does well we will need multiple variations of the advertisement made. Compensation will be added on with additional videos that are made :)"
On December 8, she messaged the person who hired her, complaining that she never agreed to her content being used on fake accounts impersonating her.
"We were not aware that our marketing team would do that either," the person responded. "We are handling this right now."
Four months later, on April 25, Sevatti got in touch with her to see if she would be interested in a job — this time advertising a new brand called Deraldi.
"You guys scam people!" she responded. "Idk know how you're even allowed on this app still!!!!!"
Another creator, who wanted to remain anonymous, told Insider that finding so many TikToks of her was "mortifying."
She accepted $60 in May 2023 to make videos for Trugala and a brand called Mazalti.
"Hi Anthony! You used my videos to scam people," she wrote to the person who hired her. "I will not be working with you anymore and have reported your scheme to Upwork."
"Wasn't used to scam anybody but ok..." the person replied. "It was an ad."
Meanwhile, adverts for creators were live on Upwork until June 9. After being contacted by Insider, Upwork removed some of the postings, and terminated the accounts. However, Insider found another posted within a few days, which is still live as of the time of publishing.
A spokesperson for Upwork told Insider that "we do not condone the use of our site by anyone misrepresenting themselves or posting deceptive jobs or marketing" and that it suspends accounts associated with violations.
Catalina Goanta, an associate professor in private law and technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Insider the sites had broken the law advertising their projects this way.
"This is absolutely illegal," she said. "There's absolutely no doubt about it that this is completely illegal because you're lying to your consumer."
Goanta said most countries consider it an unfair practice to deceive customers by riding on the authenticity that social media platforms are supposed to bring.
"You're telling them, oh, you're getting this for free, but in fact, they're not getting this for free," she said. "They're getting this for more than the worth of what it is, which is like really absurdly bad jewelry."
Not all of the sites had a clear paper trail, but Insider found company records filed with New York state authorities for two of the brands: Vulosa and Sevatti.
Two guys on Long Island
The sites are similar enough to suggest they are being run as a network. As well as sharing a marketing method, the sites have similar products, and tone of voice, draw on the same marketing and legal copy, and have similar html code.
The Vulosa and Sevatti records linked to the addresses of two of the businesses listed under the names Blake Armentano and his father William Armentano, from Long Island.
On the business database Crunchbase, Sevatti LLC is described as being founded by "Dominic and Blake," and has "provided their online audience with trendy neckwear, wristwear, and handwear to their clients since 2018."
"Since the start of their company, they have seen wild success," it says. "They have shipped out over 100,000 pieces of jewelry worldwide and look forward to their own physical location in New York in 2024."
A reporter who visited the addresses on Long Island on Insider's behalf did not find either man.
At an address for Blake Armentano in the hamlet of Dix Hills, a woman answered the door at a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood.
She declined to give her name, but said Armentano was living in another state and had not lived at the house for years. She agreed to pass on a message, but Insider did not hear back in time for publication.
An attempt to find William Armentano at a listed business address was also unsuccessful.
Blake Armentano responded to Insider via email, saying he "worked with" Vulosa, Sevatti, and Deraldi "for a brief time" but those sites were now no longer operational. He said he had nothing to do with Trugala or Mazalti, had never worked with Wilson, and described them as "copycat" sites. However, he also said it seemed the owners of Trugala were "people that I used to know, but have not had any contact with for a very long time." He did not provide further details.
In regards to the items he sold, he said he was a "Zendrop customer," and the jewelry was "properly described on the store sites as zinc and alloys, not plastic."
"Every company that sells a product typically operates on a model where the product is sold to a consumer at a price above the wholesale acquisition cost," he said.
'Always remember — there is no free lunch'
As of July 4, Sevatti's website had been taken down, but the other four remain live. Dozens of TikTok videos of fake accounts pointing people to Deraldi are still up and were being made until as recently as May. Armentano declined to comment on anything related to "marketing tactics" stating: "It's not common for companies to disclose their marketing strategies."
Goanta said it's difficult to track these kinds of schemes because they crop up "like mushrooms."
"They're going to be online for a month, and then they're not going to be online," she said. "This is their business model. There's nothing about creating a legit brand and actually getting people to buy and invest in time in a marketing strategy. It's nothing like that."
Scarborough, one of the creators who made videos for the sites, told Insider she does a lot more research on the companies she makes content for now. She is also skeptical about the message clients give her to read, rather than just following the script for an easy paycheck.
"I definitely feel like if anything feels too good to be true, then it is too good to be true," she said. "If you want to be a trustworthy person and hold to your own values and morals, you really need to know what you're talking about."
Solana, the TikToker who was tricked, threw out her jewelry when she realized it was worthless. She said it opened her eyes to how platforms like TikTok have a new breed of scams which can trick even people who are wise to more traditional scams, like phishing emails.
"I would just want to advise people to think twice about the type of things that are going up on TikTok," she said. "And always remember that there is no free lunch. That's what my mom has always taught me."
Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.