Two lawsuits by Facebook against fraudulent advertisers
Facebook announced they took legal action, by filling two separate lawsuits against the perpetrators of online scams for violating the platform’s advertising terms, a move that seems right but does feel a bit like a drop in the ocean, given the extent of criticism the platforms are receiving for the level of fraud in their networks.
The first case is against a California marketing company and its agents responsible for a bait-and-switch advertising scheme on Facebook. The second case is against e a group of individuals located in Vietnam who got users to self-compromise their Facebook accounts and ran millions of dollars of unauthorized ads.
According to Facebook, both lawsuits are among the first legal actions against these types of fraud.
In the first case, the defendants blocked and concealed user complaints and negative reviews on their Facebook Pages, by people who never received the products they had paid for.
In the second case, which was more elaborate, the defendants used a technique known as “session theft” or “cookie theft” to compromise accounts of employees of advertising and marketing agencies and then ran unauthorized ads, including online scams, through cloacking. The group managed to run over $36 million in unauthorized ads, before they were stopped.
Facebook reports that they have refunded the victims and helped them secure their accounts.
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