UK financial expert Martin Lewis has agreed to drop his defamation lawsuit against Facebook – a lawsuit brought about after crooks used his identity in thousands of adverts on the social network to promote trading get-rich-quick scams – in return for a new scam reporting option available to UK Facebook users, as well as helping fund a new UK advice initiative.
It was only last week that we published an article about how Facebook was refusing to remove these scams, even after we – and others – had reported them directly to the social network. We had reported fake sponsored adverts masquerading as UK media outlets that used fake celebrity endorsements to promote trading scams, only to be told that they didn’t violate Facebook’s ad policies.
Such scams would promise to help people get rich by investing in an automated system that would make winning trades. Many such scams claimed to be associated with crypto-currency Bitcoin, but had nothing to do with it, and those who signed up would invariably lose their money.
Watch out for Binary Option “systems” that claim they can make you rich.
Last year, one such well-known figure whose identity had been used to promote these scam adverts on Facebook, UK finance expert Martin Lewis, filed a defamation lawsuit against Facebook.
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But in a joint press conference today, Facebook’s Managing Director for Europe, Steve Hatch and Lewis announced that the lawsuit had been dropped, and in return, Facebook agreed to do three things. These are …
– Create a new reporting option for UK Facebook users that would allow them to report these sorts of scams, that would then be forwarded to a specialist team for a speedy removal.
– To donate £3 million to help set-up the Citizens Advice Scam Action (CASA) where victims or potential victims can receive advice about these sorts of scams. CASA will be connected to the already well-established Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) the leading entity for consumer advice in the UK. (CASA is expected to open around May 2019.)
– To reimburse Lewis’s legal costs.
Facebook agreed to create a reporting option specific for UK Facebook users to report adverts that lead to trading scams, and have kept open the possibility of it being adopted in other countries depending on its success. But with this, Facebook is still keeping the onus on their users to report such scam adverts to the social platform. Facebook is often accused of becoming too heavily reliant on their users to keep their platform scam-free.
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What Facebook didn’t mention is any changes to its sponsored adverts platform in terms of pre-emptively detecting and flagging adverts that appear to be suspicious, thus stopping them appear on the platform altogether. As such, it’s still likely that such scams are likely to appear on user’s newsfeeds going forward, with the promise of having them removed much quicker – something Facebook has an inconsistent record of doing, at best.
In the press conference, Lewis also pointed the finger at other companies and the online advertising industry in general, identifying both Google and Yahoo’s advertising platforms in particular for allowing the same types of adverts to appear on their publisher’s websites.
The new reporting tool and the opening of CASA are both slated to happen in May of 2019.