Cyber crooks are continuing to use fake media articles and fake celebrity endorsements to promote a series of trading scams that ask online users to invest money into a “guaranteed” system that – according to the website sales page – will make them rich. And according to Facebook, that’s okay.
Maybe you saw an article on an online media website about a new system that was making ordinary families rich. Or maybe the article talked of a new “underground” system making investors lots of money. Perhaps you read about a celebrity businessman endorsing a new system that will change the economic landscape. Or maybe you heard about some young entrepreneur inadvertently revealing a big secret on a television show. Check out the screenshots below.
The article isn’t from The Sun website, and Alan Sugar has revealed no such system.
This article isn’t The Mirror, and no such system was revealed on The Dragons Den.
Again this isn’t from The Mirror, and the story of the family is completely fake.
Yes. These are all scams.
These are only some of the malicious and deceitful ways that crooks are trying to lure potential victims to their websites. Websites that claim you can make lots of money by signing up and investing in their system.
But those systems are not going to make anyone rich, since they’re not real. What the crooks are actually trying to do is lure victims to unregulated trading brokers, such as brokers that trade in binary options or on the Forex market. The systems claim to provide secrets to essentially beat the market and only place winning trades. But that’s a lie, and the vast majority of people who sign up for the platforms will lose the money they invest. What’s also a lie is the stories and celebrity endorsement show in the adverts and fake media articles, some of which are above.
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But the crooks receive affiliate payments for referring users to those brokers, which is why these scams exist.
Such scams are gaining in popularity, and this network of crooks are using Facebook’s sponsored ads platform to lure in social media users. And despite Facebook’s insistence that they’re cleaning up their site and removing scams, of all the adverts promoting such scams that we reported to Facebook, according to the social network, none of them violated their ad policies.
Facebook’s baffling refusal to remove such well documented scams – which have been proliferating on their sponsored ads platform for some considerable time – is a worrying development for their users, and contradicts CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that his site will do more to clean up user’s newsfeeds. It’s bad enough that such scams make it as sponsored ads in the first place, since it’s a demonstration of how poorly equipped their detection systems are at pro-actively spotting such scams. But to refuse to remove them even after their own users report them is shockingly reckless.
According to Facebook, these ads are just fine. And at the time of writing, this ad is still live despite being reported days ago.
At the time of writing, the crooks are using the popular Bitcoin name to lure victims, in the hope that victims would have heard of the term but not really understand how it works. In reality, these schemes have nothing to do with the famous crypto-currency at all.
Terms like BTC Trader, Bitcoin Revolution and Bitcoin Loophole are all used to entice visitors, make them believe they’ll get rich, before the crooks direct them to trading brokers to lose all their money. We have previously discussed these scams here.
Remember, if it appears too good to be true, it probably is. There are no secret, underground trading systems that can be trading platforms, and if you see a site claiming there is, it’s probably a scam.