Lisbon, May 27, 2026 (Lusa) - Fake videos and advertisements in Portugal promote paid work to assemble pens, bracelets and other products at home, using artificial intelligence (AI) as part of a scam that misappropriates the Amazon Handmade brand.
+++ Claim: assembling bracelets or pens at home earns between €100 and
+++ €400 a day, or up to €600 per 1,000 assembled products +++
Alerts drew the attention of Lusa at the end of April to several advertisements circulating on Facebook about alleged home assembly work for bracelets, pens and other materials.
These advertisements promised earnings between €100 and €400 a day to assemble bracelets (https://archive.ph/s1pCW) or up to €600 per 1,000 assembled items.
“Use your free time to pack and assemble products at home. Assembling one item equals €0.60. Assembling 1,000 items equals €600. We deliver all materials directly to your doorstep. Contact me to start,” one advertisement audio said: https://archive.ph/t9Gmq.
Another video featured a voice claiming the business was ‘a real factory’ that ‘makes direct shipments, without intermediaries’, but the narration showed potential artificial origins.
“We are currently looking for people for part-time work that you can do at home. The work is very simple, consisting only of [unintelligible] or pen without fixed hours. All materials are sent to earn an extra income,” the video stated: https://archive.ph/OnGYu.
Static posts also circulated alongside the videos to promote assembling pens at home.
These posts offered €0.30 per 1,000 pens, meaning €300 per batch: https://archive.ph/Do9E2 and https://archive.ph/lFUtf (examples).
+++ Facts: a scam spreads fake AI-generated advertisements and
+++ misappropriates the Amazon Handmade brand +++
A simple analysis of the advertisements immediately revealed that they were fake and that artificial intelligence (AI) generated them. The images present several inconsistencies, especially in the pen assembly video, and the narrations contain several indistinguishable words and Portuguese language errors.
The page promoting all these advertisements also presented several red flags, such as bearing the name ‘Karen Parrish King’, a United States address, having zero posts and counting only 300 followers: https://archive.ph/sFuox.
However, none of the received advertisements contained active contacts or links.
Lusa consulted Facebook's transparency tab to investigate this aspect.
The tab showed that the creators established the page on 26 June 2025, managing it mostly from the US and Germany.
The tab also showed that the page had published around 160 similar advertisements since mid-April: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/g3Ghn?wr=false (click “Archived page not displaying properly? Click here” if the archive link content does not appear), and this number more than doubled in the first fortnight of May: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/EUyo4?wr=false.
An analysis of the redirection links in some active advertisements showed that they linked to at least three WhatsApp numbers.
Consequently, Lusa decided to test the scheme through one of them, identified as ‘Nina’, after registering on that platform: https://archive.ph/DB5TG.
The team simulated interest in participating in the home pen assembly during this interaction.
‘Nina’ stated that “the company has a variety of handicrafts, such as pen refills, beaded necklaces, hairpins, hair ropes and folding boxes” that could allow a “daily salary of €100 to €500”, offering “free delivery and the manufacturer bears all logistics costs.”
The operator shared an infographic showing product types and a price list after asking a few simple questions about sex and age.
The list promised payments of €0.30 per pen, €0.50 per beaded string or hair tie, €0.80 per “small paper box” and €1 for hair clips. First delivery quantities ranged between 800 and 2,000 pieces, depending on the chosen product.
Lusa chose the pens and the operator approved the application without further questions.
However, the team took the opportunity to ask several practical questions, such as whether it was necessary to issue ‘recibos verdes’ (green receipts, the Portuguese official invoices for freelancers) and what the company's name and address were.
The response recommended properly declaring the income and indicated that the company was “Amazon Serviços de Vendas, S.L.”, located at “Av. Dom João II, 1990-096 Lisbon.”
The contact later provided a link to the logistics department on another platform, Telegram, under the name Leonor Constança Maria (https://archive.ph/EkWGV). Lusa also contacted her to follow up on the application.
This manager introduced herself as being “from the Amazon Handmade reception”, repeated some questions and presented the conditions for the chosen task.
Assembling ballpoint pen refills would pay “€0.30 per piece”, noting that “on average, it is possible to produce 50–60 pieces per hour, with earnings between €15-€18 per hour”, which would result in a payment of €600 for a first batch of 2,000 pieces.
However, the process required applicants to “try it first” by creating an account on the alleged Amazon Handmade page.
The creators wrote this page in English and featured a logo similar to that multinational department (https://archive.ph/rBelG and https://archive.ph/JK2No), but a Chinese provider from the Alibaba group hosted it, using servers in the US (https://archive.ph/YHRRW, since removed).
Lusa completed this step as well, despite the computer alerting to a potential “Trojan horse” virus.
The team communicated this occurrence to the WhatsApp account, but the operator dismissed the concern with assurances that the page was safe. Various analyses and security measures also cleared the threat.
Leonor added the provided mobile number to a “craft group” after registration. The group's mission would be to “verify delivery addresses” the following day, a Sunday, between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.
This group had 1,288 members at the time (https://archive.ph/tnB9Q), increasing to 1,346 subscribers the next morning (https://archive.ph/xSaBE).
The newly created account could not send messages within this beginners' group because it was a new member, so all interactions continued in the chat with ‘Leonor’.
The objective involved gaining “access to the VIP Group, an exclusive privilege reserved for members who successfully passed the training phase and fully completed the project assigned to them.”
The coordinator validated the address (Lusa's own headquarters) the next day, and the team received a tracking code for an alleged courier company's page (https://archive.ph/i40Fp) and obtained instructions for a set of activities offering rewards between €1 and €2.
The balance totalled €6 by lunchtime, with the group recording around 150 connected users, all apparently performing the same tasks.
This included a €2 address validation bonus and another €4 for four “likes” on products on the alleged Amazon Handmade page, which the operators requested every 45 minutes.
The user had to provide an MB WAY (Portuguese mobile payments app) number or an account IBAN to receive this commission, and Lusa chose the first option.
Within seconds, the €6 actually transferred to the indicated number, with the MB WAY app only recording the sender's number without identifying the name.
Similar tasks worth €2 each followed the lunch break, which the team also completed.
A final step was necessary to receive this amount, unlike the morning period: “helping a merchant in the purchase process” by buying one of three options valued at €35, €70 and €100.
Anyone completing this eighth task would receive “commissions” of €14, €28 or €50, which would add to the amounts paid for the task and the merchant's alleged “profit”, as well as the commissions from the afternoon tasks.
Dozens of accounts shared alleged proof of these transactions, including purchases and receipts, in that beginners' group.
Lusa chose to test option one, worth €35, with the promise of receiving €76 back.
Contrary to the group instructions, the operators did not request any purchase process through the page, but rather an “immediate transfer” to a specified, identifiable IBAN allegedly belonging to “one of the sellers” of Amazon Handmade, a name the team chose not to reveal.
Lusa simulated a technical problem at that moment and postponed the payment for a few hours.
When the conversation resumed, the operator had deleted that IBAN under the false excuse that “each IBAN has an expiration date”, providing another IBAN identifiable with the full name of another alleged seller, which Lusa chose not to reveal.
The team did not make this payment, which sparked clear irritation from “Leonor”.
The team used this moment to explain to her and the other WhatsApp account that these interactions took place as part of a Lusa investigation.
Lusa received no further reactions after that, despite sending several questions.
A subsequent analysis of the bank record for the €6 payment via MB WAY identified the name Alice Henriques as the sender.
The team also contacted the involved number via WhatsApp, and the person who responded denied making any transfer or having the name appearing on the bank record.
Lusa questioned SIBS (the company managing Portugal's payment network) after that response, which guaranteed the impossibility of simulating a transfer from another number, but explained that the involved banking institutions hold the transfer data, which carries bank secrecy.
Additional investigations through open sources revealed a phone directory where the number registered in the MB WAY transfer is indeed linked to the name identified in the bank transaction.
Lusa confronted the same number with this evidence but received no replies.
Meanwhile, the tracking information for the alleged shipment of pens to Lusa's headquarters continued to update well after all these conversations.
This included processing updates in the days following the disclosure of the journalistic investigation, with the platform simulating that it cancelled the shipment after six days, when delivery should have occurred: https://archive.ph/Rs0vi.
SIC Verifica (Portuguese media fact-checking outlet) touched upon a similar fraudulent scheme in February, which users promoted at the time through TikTok videos: https://archive.ph/WqBxx.
The same accounts and others still hold dozens of similar videos even though those examples are no longer available, with some clips gathering many thousands of views and hundreds of interested users: https://archive.ph/HkhLC, https://archive.ph/1rz29 and https://archive.ph/zZTdF (examples).
It remains unclear whether this involves the same network, but Lusa identified similar schemes in the US (https://archive.ph/QfnYB), Japan (https://archive.ph/sIiAV), the UK and Germany, as well as more than a dozen identical pages hijacking the image of Amazon Handmade: https://archive.ph/b1l6g, https://archive.ph/gGJXd, https://archive.ph/Lxnp2, https://archive.ph/D4u4s or https://archive.ph/r3GNH (examples, some still active). The comment sections of these types of TikTok videos also feature complaints and testimonials from people whom scammers defrauded when they made one of the eighth task purchases and failed to receive the promised rewards, profits, bonuses and commissions.
+++ Contradictory +++
The Lusa team sent questions to all WhatsApp numbers, Telegram accounts and emails identified in the scheme, receiving no responses.
The team also questioned Amazon, a recognised international brand that indeed has an “Amazon Handmade” department, though with a slightly different logo: https://archive.ph/FFrMG The company said in response that “these sites have no connection with Amazon” and that the company “is investigating this matter and working to remove these fraudulent sites”, while also appealing to consumers to report any suspected scams.
Amazon said that “fraudulent schemes attempting to impersonate the company put consumers at risk”, which is why the multinational “will continue to invest in their protection and in public education on how to avoid scams”, as its latest “Trusted Shopping Experience Report” also shows: https://archive.ph/roxFI.
+++ Lusa Assessment: False +++
Claims that people can earn between €100 and €400 a day assembling pens, bracelets or other materials at home are false, despite widespread promotion through fraudulent advertisements on various social networks featuring AI-generated videos and alleged testimonials.
The scheme hijacking the Amazon Handmade image promises high earnings, including initial bonuses and commissions obtained through simple but quick tasks, but scammers defraud participants when they must make payments or purchases to access the initial commissions and an alleged VIP club with “more advantages.”
LYGA/LYT // ADB.
Lusa
