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In a series of articles, Dagens Nyheter has examined the billion-dollar criminal industry that tricks small savers into doing everything they own with fake investments in bitcoin. A large number of victims have told DN how it all starts with an ad they saw on Facebook, where a celebrity is said to have recounted how he got rich quickly and easily.
In association with Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, and the media in several countries, Dagens Nyheter has been able to reveal an advertising agency in San Diego, California, which is behind a large part of the false advertisements. The company name is Ads Inc and using the advertising agency’s own database, Dagens Nyheter has been able to map the fake ads used by famous people.
Ads are the front door and a crucial part of the design.
In an email interview with Dagens Nyheter and other outlets in the collaboration comment on Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook, fighting fake ads.
He says Facebook has vastly expanded its department to review ads and has hired thousands of people to tackle the celebrity ad problem.
– We do not want ads on Facebook that try to ruin people, it is not good for them, it undermines trust in our services and it hurts our business, he says.
Rob Leathern is based at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California and leads the company’s work with business integrity. He says Facebook is constantly looking for new ways to stop ads and that they have learned a lot. He says that the people behind the networks are very persistent and well funded.
Testimonies of the many victims because the scams behind the ads are obviously a problem for Facebook. When asked directly if they feel comfortable making money from these types of ads, Facebook avoids responding that they don’t want these types of ads.
Rob Leathern says that Facebook puts significant resources into work and that they develop their systems to automatically detect scams. One important method that they will now expand is accessing scammers even outside of Facebook’s own platforms.
In several cases, they have proceeded with lawsuits and lawsuits against people who circumvented their advertising rules and spread scams.
– To combat this, we not only work by detecting and rejecting the ads themselves, but we also block advertisers from our services and, in some cases, take them to court. Although no action is perfect, we continue to explore new technologies and methods to stop these offensive ads and the people behind them, says Rob Leathern.
The most common method According to Rob Leathern, getting ads that violate Facebook’s advertising rules is a technology that displays different content on pages depending on who is viewing the page, which is called “cloaking.” When the Facebook ad review is complete, they may see a different page than the one then displayed to the regular Facebook visitor.
This is exactly the technology used by the advertising agency Ads Inc, he claims.
Other ways are to misspell the names of famous people, hide parts of the text behind the images, all to make it difficult to automatically control the ads.
Completely banning images of famous people in ads is not relevant according to Facebook.
In Sweden, Digitization Minister Anders Ygeman, among other things, has said that the government wants to work to be able to fine Facebook for false ads.
Police professor Leif GW Persson, who is used in the scam, has also demanded legislation against online giants such as Google and Facebook.
