A few months ago I was about to buy a flight. The page showed "Only 2 seats left at this price" in red letters. I hesitated, then refreshed the page out of curiosity.
The counter said "Only 2 seats left" again. Same number. It had been resetting on every page load the whole time.
That's when I started cataloguing every trick I'd seen on shopping sites and built a Chrome extension that flags them automatically, in real time, on any page.
This isn't just my opinion — it's documented research
In 2019, Princeton and University of Chicago researchers scraped 11,000 shopping sites and found dark patterns on more than 1,250 of them. The FTC has since fined several companies specifically for fake countdown timers and pre-checked subscription boxes. This isn't a grey area anymore — it's a known, studied, and increasingly regulated practice.
