Have you bought anything during this Black Friday or Cyber Monday? If so, this news is of interest to you. And if you haven’t bought anything, too. It is Black Friday week and in shop windows, across websites, on the radio and in your email inbox will be discounts to tempt you. Shoppers are expected to splurge almost £8bn online alone. But all those deals may not all be what they seem. The BBC’s Consumer Affairs correspondent, Colletta Smith, visits Bangor University’s consumer psych lab to learn just how we’re all influenced by taking three tests that will show the extent to which we are sucked in.

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Lots of apps and websites claim to be able to use data to sort through profiles for better matches. By completing their personality tests, they say they can save your thumb the effort of swiping. The issue for scientists who might want to investigate their data, and journalists who want to fact-check their claims, is that the algorithms are the intellectual property of these companies, so they are not publicly available. Their entire business is based on developing smart match-making algorithms and keeping their formulas private.

What do you think of using dating apps to ‘find love’? Do you think they work?

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In the late 19^th century, cigarettes were seen as lower-status than cigars, which –crucially– were proving altogether harder to mechanize but the secret to increase its production –and therefore, sales– was in advertising. The idea originated in Virginia by James Bonsack, an inventor who needed to boost its economy (and actually did). By 1923, cigarettes had become the most popular way for Americans to consume tobacco.

Many early advertising campaigns now raise eyebrows. Lucky Strikes, for instance, were pitched as an aid to slimming. «Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,» ran the tagline.

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Martín-Consuegra’s case is one of the many such fraudulent methods used in the rental market in Spain, and which are benefiting from a 50% rise in prices over the last five years. The situation is given current precarious employment and few options to buy properties that live renting as the only option left open.

This is where scammers’ picaresque comes into play through the publication of fake ads that offer inexistent luxury flats under ‘ideal conditions’.

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