A "70% off" designer bag or coat that shows up in your social feed is worth a second look before you tap buy. Federal pricing rules require that a discounted price be measured against a price the seller actually charged for a real stretch of time — and federal regulators say the ads you see on social platforms aren't vetted before they run. Those two facts together mean the size of the discount tells you almost nothing until you check where the "before" price came from.
What actually makes a "was" price real?
The Federal Trade Commission's rule on former-price advertising is specific: a "former price" is only legitimate if it was "the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time," according to the FTC's Guides Against Deceptive Pricing. The rule gives a direct example of what breaks it — marking a $10 item "Reduced to $9.99" and calling that a real discount, since the gap is too small to reflect an authentic prior selling price.
The same rule covers manufacturer list prices and "comparable value" claims, which retailers sometimes use instead of a true "was" price. A list price only counts as bona fide "if it is the price at which substantial sales are made in the advertiser's trade area," per the regulation — not simply the highest number ever printed on a tag. In every version of the rule, the seller is required to "act honestly and in good faith." A discount claim that skips straight to a percentage, with no dated prior price and no seller behind it you can verify, isn't following this framework — it's just a number.
Why do the steepest discounts show up on social media?
This is where the math and the platform intersect. The FTC has flagged that "social media platforms don't always thoroughly vet the ads you see or the advertisers behind them," and it used almost this exact scenario as its example: an ad for "that designer bag you've been dreaming of," marked half off for a limited time. The agency's point isn't that every discounted ad is fake — it's that the platform showing it to you hasn't checked.
The FTC also reports that people told the agency they lost more than $95 million in 2025 to scams that started with social media ads, and it notes the real total is likely higher because many losses go unreported. Among the tactics the agency names: sellers impersonating established brands and marketing counterfeit goods at steep discounts. A too-good price on an unfamiliar account isn't proof of fraud by itself, but it's exactly the shape the agency is describing.
How do you check before you buy?
None of this requires forensic work. It requires slowing down for the two minutes a legitimate seller can survive and a scam one usually can't.
- Search the brand or seller name paired with words like "scam" or "complaint" before you enter payment information — a step regulators recommend precisely because it surfaces patterns other shoppers already found.
- Go to the retailer's own site directly instead of tapping through the ad, and compare the price there against what the ad promised. A real sale shows up on the seller's own listing, not just in someone else's feed.
- Treat a countdown clock or "today only" framing as a reason to slow down, not speed up — regulators note that legitimate sellers don't generally need to rush a purchase decision.
- Pay with a credit card rather than a wire transfer, payment app, gift card, or cryptocurrency if a seller pushes back on standard payment methods — that pushback is itself a signal worth weighing.
- Talk it through with someone else before you check out on an unfamiliar site. It sounds basic, but a second set of eyes on a screenshot of the ad catches details — a slightly misspelled brand name, a domain that doesn't match — that are easy to miss when you're moving fast.
Adjusting how much of your browsing history feeds your ad targeting is a smaller, longer-term version of the same idea: the more a platform infers about what you'll click on, the more precisely an ad can be built to bypass your skepticism. That's a privacy setting, not a purchase-time check, but it's part of the same defense.
Does "reasonably substantial period of time" have a fixed length?
The regulation doesn't attach a specific number of days or weeks to that phrase, and that's deliberate — the FTC's own guides note that what counts as substantial depends on the type of merchandise and how the trade normally sells it. What the rule does fix is the standard, not the calendar: the former price has to be one the seller actually charged, to real customers, for long enough that it reflects genuine selling behavior rather than a number posted for a day specifically to be crossed out. A markdown timeline you can't see or verify fails that standard regardless of how long it claims to have run.
What if the deal turns out to be fake?
If you've already paid, contact your card issuer about a dispute, since payment method is exactly why the guidance above steers you toward a credit card in the first place. Separately, the FTC takes reports of fraudulent ads at its official reporting site, which feeds the pattern data the agency uses to flag repeat offenders — reporting a bad ad doesn't get your money back on its own, but it's the mechanism that exists.
None of this means every deep discount is suspect. Genuine clearance sales, end-of-season markdowns, and documented price drops happen constantly and are usually easy to verify against the retailer's own price history. The distinction isn't the size of the number — it's whether there's a real prior price, from a real seller, that you can check yourself before you pay.
For a related value perspective, read How to tell if that “was” price is actually real.