Why is it so difficult to solve the fraudulent ads problem?
The world’s largest advertising platforms Google and Facebook are tracing fraudsters who make people lose their life savings thinking they are investing in cryptocurrencies.
Global fake advertising featuring celebrities and made-up news stories are used to persuade people to invest in cryptocurrencies promising investors huge profits. But all investors lose their money and many are tricked to put in even more money not to risk losing what they have already invested. It is unfortunately though all a scam, with companies working globally using fake ads with pictures of celebrities and fantasy news stories about successful investments in order to make, especially elderly, savers to invest.
The scam is often focusing European countries but is also reported from for instance Australia and Latin America, a map from non-profit network Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) shows.
What are the companies doing to solve the problem?
Publishers in many countries and Google and Facebook are trying to get to grips with the fake ads that are a threat to well-know and serious publishers´ trustworthiness when the fake ads and news stories are published on their websites. Publishers say it is the big IT companies´ responsibility to see to that the fake ads are stopped with Facebook and Google answering that they are investing heavily to come to grips with the ads. However, so far it seems the fraudulent adverting companies find ways around the control systems the IT companies are setting up.
Google´s head of communication, Norther Europe, Mark Jensen, said that trying to stop the fake ads is “a cat and rat play. The bluffers constantly develop strategies trying to avoid our systems but we are determined to fight them”.
“We do not allow deceptive advertising that aim to deceive or avoid our checking of advertising. In July, we extended our policy to better handle clickbait and sensation headlines as an addition to our already strict policy forbidding advertising for cryptocurrencies in Europe”.
Jessica Romero, Facebook Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, said in a blog that her company has sued a company for violating Facebook Terms and Policies by providing cloaking software and services designed to circumvent automated ad review systems, and ultimately run deceptive ads on Facebook and (Facebook owned) Instagram. Cloaking is a malicious technique that impairs ad review systems by concealing the nature of the website linked to an ad.
In the case taken to court in California, software was used to conceal websites featuring scams related to COVID-19, cryptocurrency, pharmaceuticals, diet pills, and fake news pages. Some of these cloaked websites also included images of celebrities, she said adding that Facebook has also taken technical enforcement measures.
Rob Leathern, responsible for Facebook´s business integrity, says the company is trying new ways to stop the fake ads but that persons organizing the networks are persistent and well financed. No measures are perfect but we continue developing new technology and methods to stop these offensive ads and the people behind them, he said.
PUBLISHERS INVESTIGATING
Investigative journalism network OCCRP has in cooperation with a number of publishers investigated how the fake investment business is operated. Publishers have also contributed stories about savers who have been persuades to put up all their savings and in many cases also been talked into taking loans to go on investing in fake businesses.
Publishers like The Guardian, Le Monde, Buzzfeed News, Swedish Dagens Nyheter and Finnish Helsingin Sanomat recently published stories in cooperation with OCCRP saying that an advertising company in San Diego, USA is the origin of fake cryptocurrency investment ads. The founder of the company is reported to have been killed 2019 in a helicopter crash and it is unknown who is now running the company.
OCCRP reports that last year, a whistleblower approached Dagens Nyheter saying he had been employed by a company in Kyiv, Ukraine that is part of scam investment in cryptocurrencies
Through relentless onslaughts of phone calls and emails, an army of young salespeople scammed people around the world who were vulnerable to their sales pitch, whether that was because they were elderly, infirm, naive — or simply optimistic, the OCCRP reports.
”Journalists spent months following up on the extensive evidence provided by this whistleblower: thousands of call logs, customer lists, documentation of money transfers, and strikingly callous internal notes on how to target prospective victims, then keep wringing cash out of them for months.”
Law enforcement officials interviewed by OCCRP and its partners say these types of fraud networks are difficult to dismantle, because they do most of their work by phone and online, hopping virtually across borders and even oceans to track down their victims.
A WELL ORGANISED CRIME BUSINESS
The organization joined forces with more than 20 media outlets around the world to investigate how the Kyiv company operates.
”Over several months, we pieced together the evidence to discover exactly how the scammers targeted their victims, and what happened to these people after they had lost everything.”
The investigation showed how call centres around the world linked to the company in Kyiv and finally to Sweden where the whistleblower has delivered his evidence to prosecutors, the OCCRP reports.
Dagens Nyheter informed that the newspaper has tested to use Google´s ad service for fake ads. The test shows how you can buy ads that, without permission, is using celebrities´ names saying they have successfully invested in cryptocurrencies.
Google´s head of communication, Norther Europe, Mark Jensen, said that Google has studied the examples given by the newspaper and has taken action including against special accounts.
The fake investment ads have been a plague for years destroying people´s life savings. Dagens Nyheter´s editor-in.chief, Peter Wolodarski, said that his newspaper temporarily has closed its ad system to stop the fake ads, that this means considerably less revenue as stopping the ad system also means stopping fair ads but that the newspaper´s trustworthiness always is a priority. He says Google and Facebook have a heavy responsibility as they have not been able to stop the bluffers from advertising.
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