A very dangerous scam is spreading on Facebook, but the social site is spreading its arms

Celebrities have nothing to do with bitcoin

In recent weeks, there has been a significant proliferation of ads on Facebook that appear to be famous Hungarian businessmen, such as Sándor Csányi, György Gattyán or Lőrinc Mészáros, talk about the secret to getting rich, which, according to the articles, is nothing more than a bitcoin trading program. Although the personality of entrepreneurs is different, it usually appears in all these articles.

• the logos of well-known television channels and news sites are used, in one case even the image of 24.hu was copied by the editors of the article,
• they talk about the secret of getting rich in bitcoin trading, but the MNB does not allow them to tell on television exactly how the secret recipe works,
• give an exclusive interview to the “magazine” explaining how the bitcoin trading program works,
• and the article concludes that journalists have also tested and enriched the commercial program.

Business people, of course, have nothing to do with bitcoin.: OTP and the Docler Group of Gattyán also issued a statement denying that their CEO would deal with cryptocurrencies.

While the advertisements are very similar anyway, there appear to be various types of “commercial programs” advertised by fake news sites with the faces of entrepreneurs and companies. For example, one ad promotes commercial software called “Bitcoin Era”, another leads to a program called “Bitcoin Billionaire”, and a third runs as “Bitcoin Loophole.”

Bitcoin Era, for example, promises its users a minimum daily return of $ 1,100 in exchange for 20 minutes of “work”. Bitcoin Billionaire promises “millions” to the user, and Bitcoin Loophole promises a return of $ 1,300 “24 hours a day”.

We have also signed up for several of these services – it turned out that in fact, none of them have anything to do with bitcoin, but CFD trading platforms advertise through fraudulent advertisements. One of those companies is Absolute Global Markets and the other is a company called Galore Pro.

Both companies unlicensed offshore broker, but at least they correctly state in their terms of use that

the invested capital MAY FAIL AT ANY TIME BY THE MERCHANTS, and they may even make additional claims against the user, but they are not responsible for anything in the world.

It is not worth talking to any of the companies, it is probably about depositing our money in the system and never seeing it again.

We are facing an international problem

Although the creators of the fake advertisements undoubtedly made an effort to shape their pseudo-news according to Hungarian conditions, This is an international problem, similar announcements are not only spreading in Hungary.

British television host Rylan Clark-Neal drew attention on Twitter to the fact that Bitcoin is being sold on his behalf in an interview he apparently had with the Daily Mirror, similar to Mészáros or Gattyán, a commercial show that reportedly made millions. searching. Clark-Neal made it clear: He had nothing to do with the fake news so no one would fall in love with him.

Marin Lewis, a renowned British financial expert also sued Facebook, for allowing non-existent recommendations written on your behalf to circulate on the community platform.

John de Mol Dutch media mogul also won such a lawsuit against Facebook: social networks every time When the face of a celebrity appears in a fake news that circulates on their platforms, they have to pay a fine of 10,000 euros.

But those ads have also appeared on behalf of Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mel Gibson, and various Australian celebrities.

The fake György Gattyán interview, which is being broadcast in Hungary, has been translated from semi-Czech into Czech, proving that This fake news is spreading in other parts of our region.

So many people fall for those ads that

In the Netherlands alone, fake celebrity and bitcoin ads caused 1.8 million euros in damage in one year.

Why leave this on Facebook?

Facebook itself claims to be fighting tooth and nail in the scams that spread on the platform, but they haven’t really been able to do anything about the problem that has existed internationally for years.

For a time, the solution was to completely ban all cryptocurrency ads: between January 2018 and May 2019, no ads offering virtual money could be served on the platform.

Later, Facebook embarked on the development of a kind of virtual money, Libra, in parallel with the reactivation of crypto ads on the platform. While there are indications that Libra has failed by now, they have not backtracked to lift the ban on crypto ads.

The current solution is to hand over responsibility for content filtering to users: the community has the ability to report ads, if it feels like a scam, but it’s pretty sure that many will fall for ads that copy the faces of celebrities or authentic media by the time Facebook moderators take them off the platform.

Even if an advertiser is banned by a scam, the scammers will make a shovel pack of another page and another scam, It can then spread out on the site for days, weeks before being slapped by moderators.

A solution for example, ads posted on Facebook are pre-filtered by the service provider, i.e. It will only allow a paid ad if you are sure it is not a scam. This, of course, would consume a lot of additional resources on the part of the company and they would also lose significant revenue.

Fake news senders pay for Facebook to advertise on the platform and reach as many people as possible with their scams, so Facebook has no monetary interest in pooling resources to filter crypto scams. Of course, however, reputational damage and legal costs affect the community as well, but they do not seem to weigh enough to provide more resources to combat financial scams.

However, somehow, all the fake news about John de Mol could be removed from the platform after being fined $ 10,000 for each release, proving that it would theoretically be possible to leak such content.

But of course it’s easier to pocket ad revenue and then remove scam posts only when they hurt enough people and then generously announce how many people they have helped.

The only thing you can hope for now is that in a few years, Facebook will develop an algorithm that filters out fraudulent ads, but of course this is also a matter of additional resources that the community platform may not want to spend to remedy the situation. Similar algorithms are already used to moderate images and text (not necessarily served as ads), but they are still less sophisticated, and in the end, many people decide whether to go or stay in a post on a media surface. However, unintentionally, the social site appears to be taking a more flexible approach to paying advertisers so far.

Cover image: Shutterstock