Karen Soper, a 58-year-old woman from Wales, had gone nearly two decades without natural teeth after losing them to gum disease. Since she could not afford professional dental treatment and also had problems with her usual dentures, she thought she had found an affordable solution on Facebook.
The ad promised moldable dentures for home use and showed people smiling and eating apples and corn on the cob while wearing them. Convinced that she had found a simple alternative, Soper paid £14,99, around US$20, for the product. The Facebook page from which she made the purchase had barely 18 followers.
But when the package arrived, the result was completely different from what the advertisement showed. Soper said the pieces were made of cheap, hard plastic, did not resemble those in the ad, and she could not even keep them in her mouth: every time she tried to put them in, they fell out.
The disappointment was so great that the woman ended up comparing them to Haribo’s famous rubber teeth. “Haribo teeth look better”, she said. Soper decided to share her experience to warn other people to be careful with similar products offered through social media.
The case once again highlighted one of the major risks of buying products based on promotional photos and videos on social media: an offer that seems too good to be true may end up being exactly that.