Earlier this year, Facebook vowed to tackle the growing problem of scammers exploiting their sponsored ads platform by placing ads designed to trick social media users into signing up for trading get-rich-quick scams.
Scammers would publish get-rich-quick ads and pay Facebook to display them to their users. Those ads would lead to a fake news report claiming some well-known celebrity had endorsed a get-rich-quick system. That report would then direct the visitor to some type of trading scheme where a visitor would be asked to invest money, which would then almost certainly be lost.
The problem came to a head at the start of 2019 when one of the celebrities whose identity was being used by the scammers to trick Facebook users – UK based ‘money saving expert’ Martin Lewis – filed a lawsuit against Facebook for not handing the situation effectively.
Watch out for Binary Option “systems” that claim they can make you rich.
Lewis subsequently agreed to drop the lawsuit if Facebook removed the scam adverts and provided an effective reporting tool for UK users to remove offending adverts more efficiently, all before May 2019.
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However, it seems Facebook may have failed in those efforts.
This week, we discovered two such adverts posted by different Facebook pages that led to the same get-rich-quick scam aimed at luring visitors into handing over money that they’ll probably never see again.
And after looking at each of those Facebook pages that were publishing the adverts, both had a number of similar adverts running elsewhere on Facebook that all led to the same get-rich-quick scam. And just as before, reporting those adverts did not result in Facebook removing them. Both adverts we reported last week are – at the time of writing – active and being displayed to Facebook users.
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While the adverts were no longer using Martin Lewis’s identity – something that would likely get them removed quicker – the scammers having been using a whole host of other celebrities including Game of Thrones actor Kit Harrington, sports pundit Michael Owen and actor Robert Downey Jr. (below) falsely claiming the celebrities had endorsed or announced a money making scheme.
Again, these adverts were directing social media users to fake news reports about trading schemes that purported could make you thousands of dollars a day in profits. And those news reports – including the fake report below – directed visitors to unregulated trading platforms where most people will lose any money they invest.
In the above screenshot, a sponsored Facebook advert linked to a fake BBC News article, which in turn linked to a trading scam called Bitcoin Evolution which has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Other variants exist including Bitcoin Loophole and Bitcoin Code.
How to make money using the Internet without getting scammed.
Naturally, don’t fall for these scams or invest any money in them. Of course you can also report spammy adverts to Facebook, but at the moment, just like with us, that may accomplish very little.