The Fake Black Entrepreneurs Selling You Overpriced Junk on TikTok

A tearful Black woman named Aliyah pleads with viewers to save her handmade belt buckle business. She wipes a tear, her voice cracking with emotion. The video has millions of views. But Aliyah isn't real. She's an AI-generated avatar, and her "handcrafted" buckles are mass-produced products sold on Shein for a fraction of the price.

This is the latest grift flooding TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook: fake small-business owners, often portrayed as marginalized people, pushing dropshipped goods. The Verge found dozens of these accounts, many created in the last two months. They use nearly identical scripts—struggling artisan, tearful plea, call to support—with only the avatar's race or product swapped out. Black women characters get the most engagement; Aliyah alone has 40,000 followers.

The videos are riddled with tells: robotic voices, mismatched emotions, products that don't match the narrative, and backgrounds that repeat across accounts. But for many viewers, the emotional hook works. Gizelle Bryant from The Real Housewives of Potomac recently admitted she bought two crocheted bags after seeing an AI-generated Black boy claim he was bullied for crocheting. "I want to help this little Black boy make his goal," she said on her podcast.

Experts call this "empathy bait." Jeremy Carrasco, who researches AI-generated media, says his team finds up to 100 new scam accounts daily. "These are retail scams that link to Shopify stores," he explains. The avatars pretend to craft items, attend fairs, and respond to comments—all automated.

Cienna Davis, a communications researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the trend as digital blackface. "It mimics Black cultural expression for personal or economic gain," she says. "It's rooted in minstrelsy and the idea that Blackness is exploitable."

The platforms aren't stopping it. Carrasco says users have seconds to spot the fakes before they've already engaged. Until social media companies enforce labeling and detection, these scams will keep multiplying—and people will keep falling for them.