7 ms·

ACCC takes action against Meta over scam celebrity crypto ads on Facebook

59 points by ilamont 5y ago

ariannadaisy14 5y ago
batch12 5y ago
This sounds reasonable to me. So much tracking is used to target consumers. They seem to know the consumers better than the producers of these ads.
philliphaydon 5y ago
Oh I would love for them to take action against the millions of adverts for mobile games where video is either unrelated to the game or stolen from other games.
- prawn 5y ago
  At one point I had a blocklist of absolutely dozens of these in AdSense and they were still getting through and advertising on my site. Evony or something. Google didn't do a great deal to help stop it.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Evony is an amusingly long-running example. They've been running misleading ads for their game since 2009 (NB: includes some NSFW ads): https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-of-evony-video-game-ads/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-o... But I think what the parent was referring to was more along the lines of games which literally use images from other games -- or, in some cases, games which don't exist at all -- in their advertisements.
    - prawn 5y ago
      Evony might as well not exist at all either - not like I was ever going to play it! How does a publisher verify whether images are from the project being advertised? How do they verify that the game exists? On HN, we talk about running ads to build a database of interested users for a project we might not have created yet. I think we can hold companies to greater account for not locking out bad actors once they're identified, but I can't see a viable way to do that pre-publishing short of an ad requiring potentially hours of due diligence. And after the fact, we'd require any advertisers to have a local (business) presence so that false advertising claims could be dealt with. I'd be all for that.
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        When I say "games that don't exist at all", I actually have two specific ad campaigns (or, possibly, groups of copycat ad campaigns?) in mind. One campaign contained illustrations showing a physical scenario involving barriers that the player could remove to help or harm a character, e.g. by dropping a character into lava, or by releasing that lava to destroy an enemy. The advertising campaign sent viewers to a generic match-three game, a la Bejeweled; the game appearing in the advertisements didn't exist (although some other enterprising developers actually created the game later on). Another campaign contained illustrations of a character faced with obstacles and given a selection of objects to overcome that obstacle, e.g. a character faced with a fire might be offered a gasoline can, a firehose, and a vacuum cleaner. These advertisements typically showed a player choosing the wrong item, causing the player character to be graphically injured or killed, and challenged the viewer to do better. Again, these ads typically sent the viewer to a match-three game bearing no resemblance to the advertised game. Neither of these was a situation where a developer was running an ad campaign to gauge interest in a game concept -- these campaigns ran for years (and may even still be ongoing), and were used to drive users to finished games completely different from the advertised content.
prawn 5y ago
"In one shocking instance, we are aware of a consumer who lost more than $650,000 due to one of these scams being falsely advertised as an investment opportunity on Facebook." Brutal. I'd be interested to know how much they're relying on "This was reported to Meta and they failed to act" and how much was the expectation that the publisher know which celebrities are endorsing what? Matt Damon is endorsing crypto and almost any crypto promos seem somewhat scammy, so it's not out of the question. Should a publisher know who is or isn't endorsing? I've always wondered how far you could get using lookalikes but no names. Or random people with the same name as a celebrity, but not using a visual likeness.
- batch12 5y ago
  Even if they don't know the endorsing parties, they should know something about whoever paid for the ad.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Sure, but that could be a small agency indistinguishable from a spam operation, and is the expectation that the publisher vet each claim and endorsee? They should be able to address complaints and to prevent repeat attempts to breach this, but is stopping it altogether feasible? I don't use Facebook so maybe they already do this, but it's probably reasonable to require anyone advertising in a country to have a registered business presence within that country. But that's only going to work at scale (AdSense, FB, etc) and not with randoms putting ads on a site that anyone can see.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      > and is the expectation that the publisher vet each claim and endorsee? Maybe yes? If you're paid to artificially promote some content to lots of people, even more so if there's targeting criteria associated (targeting the most vulnerable to fall for such scams) you should share responsibility? In the real world you can't hold a banner "CHEAP DRUGS SOLD HERE" without getting in trouble and I doubt the excuse of "I'm just a platform, not responsible for anything" is going to fly. > is stopping it altogether feasible Yes. Make a human review every single ad and raise the prices if necessary.
jimrandomh 5y ago
I haven't seen this on Facebook (I have ads blocked there and see almost nothing from people I don't know personally), but I see this a lot on Twitter, on YouTube, and in email spam (some of which makes it through gmail's spam filter). The scammers have fairly sophisticated tactics and a high degree of automation; flagging and blocking individual spam accounts is useless, they clearly have scripts churning them out. Fighting spam is a legitimately difficult problem. It's particularly difficult with crypto-scams, because the per-victim profit is so high that the spammers wind up well-resourced. Given that other major platforms have mostly failed to deal with the same scammers, it doesn't seem reasonable to hold Facebook-in-particular liable.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The difference between spam and this is that these are paid advertisements that Facebook happily profited from.
  - jimrandomh 5y ago
    Unlikely. Given that these are scammers, they wouldn't want a trail of payment information leading to their real identities. So I'd expect them to use stolen credit cards and stolen accounts, which tends to lead to a lot of chargebacks and a net loss.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      There's some loss for sure, but given that ads are free to Facebook, even a 10% success ratio is still profit. Either way, whether it's later charged back or not, it doesn't change the fact that Facebook is initially happy to take money to artificially promote & spread this harmful content.
      - jimrandomh 5y ago
        Chargebacks aren't free; the payment processors charge a substantial penalty.
timoth3y 5y ago
Unpopular Opinion: Celebrities should be held legally accountable for the products they endorse. If a "reasonable person" can look at the info the celeb or influencer had at the time and consider it a scam or untruthful, the celebrity should face financial penalties for making that endorsement.
- nojs 5y ago
  I think you may have misread the headline. These scams use fake “celebrity endorsements”, the “celebrities” are not actually endorsing anything.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  If you hadn't heard about this one: https://hypebeast.com/2022/2/lana-rhoades-cryptosis-1-5-million-usd-nft-rug-pull https://hypebeast.com/2022/2/lana-rhoades-cryptosis-1-5-mill...
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion: people should take responsibility for their financial decisions. Like I’m sorry you gave all your money to a scammer, or bought the wrong coin. But that ain’t my problem. And it isn’t societies either.
  - hugh-avherald 5y ago
    Pretty obvious impact on society and markets if fraud is unpunished.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      True. And nobody likes fraud. And it should be dealt with. I just have trouble having sympathy for people that willingly hand over money to obvious scams. Double your Bitcoin is a classic one. Yeah, right, elons going to double your deposit. Greedy stupid people fall for it, lose, why didn’t someone protect me.
      - 5y ago
oceanghost 5y ago
My Facebook ads are 50% crypto-scams, 40% bizarre and weird gambling games, and 10% medications. So basically 90% scams. And even the medications are probably iffy. It feels very much like the dot-com bubble to me. There is no way Facebook doesn't know about it.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  > And even the medications are probably iffy The very foundational idea of "the advertising of medication" is worse than iffy, without getting into the entire cesspool-chain of companies behind the companies behind the advertising. Let's round it up to 100% and write to our local representatives, yeah?
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    You know what was funny about a couple of them-- instructed me to "talk to my patients about" a medication. Very bad targeting there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jfoster 5y ago
I think it's understandable that big platforms face problems of scale with moderating ads & content, but one thing I've noticed is that Meta are extremely sensitive in rejecting ads due to images being imperfect or other minor things, yet Facebook & Instagram seem filled with crypto & fake IPO scams. I think they've misallocated moderation resources. On the other hand, whilst I think the ACCC is right to pursue them over this, does it have anything to do with their previous showdown? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-18/facebook-blocked-australian-news-the-inside-story/100839284 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-18/facebook-blocked-aust...
- firecall 5y ago
  My sense is probably not directly. Certainly there would be general political pressure to keep Big Tech in line. Australia has a history of taking tech to task: remember a decade or more ago they pulled Adobe up over local pricing! On another note, I do find it weird that Facebook Ads in AU mostly seem to be low quality brands and scams! I work in marketing and have looked after 8 figure budgets so have some industry experience. But yet I'm left wondering why I never see big brands on Facebook in AU! FWIW I do advise my clients to critically consider FB or Google Ads due to the levels of click fraud. You need serious budgets to be able to absorb the fraud and see positive ROI in AU! YMMV :-)
  - airtonix 5y ago
    > But yet I'm left wondering why I never see big brands on Facebook in AU! > FWIW I do advise my clients to critically consider FB or Google Ads due to the levels of click fraud. Looks like you answered your own question! :)
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Well also some of the crypto scam ads picked the wrong dude to impersonate, someone with old fashioned values and money to fight back - Andrew Forest who started FMG mining.
nomilk 5y ago
I stumbled across one of these sponsored posts, it looked like a blatant scam but was well enough crafted that unsuspecting folk could easily fall for it. Surprisingly, some comments were >6 weeks old (meaning it had been up for at least that long), and it had hundreds of 'reactions' (hinting it had been displayed to a lot of people).
jeffybefffy519 5y ago
Do meta and google do human review of all advertisements or is it all automated?

59 points by ilamont 5y ago

This sounds reasonable to me. So much tracking is used to target consumers. They seem to know the consumers better than the producers of these ads.

philliphaydon 5y ago

Oh I would love for them to take action against the millions of adverts for mobile games where video is either unrelated to the game or stolen from other games.

prawn 5y ago
At one point I had a blocklist of absolutely dozens of these in AdSense and they were still getting through and advertising on my site. Evony or something. Google didn't do a great deal to help stop it.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Evony is an amusingly long-running example. They've been running misleading ads for their game since 2009 (NB: includes some NSFW ads): https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-of-evony-video-game-ads/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-o... But I think what the parent was referring to was more along the lines of games which literally use images from other games -- or, in some cases, games which don't exist at all -- in their advertisements.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Evony might as well not exist at all either - not like I was ever going to play it! How does a publisher verify whether images are from the project being advertised? How do they verify that the game exists? On HN, we talk about running ads to build a database of interested users for a project we might not have created yet. I think we can hold companies to greater account for not locking out bad actors once they're identified, but I can't see a viable way to do that pre-publishing short of an ad requiring potentially hours of due diligence. And after the fact, we'd require any advertisers to have a local (business) presence so that false advertising claims could be dealt with. I'd be all for that.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      When I say "games that don't exist at all", I actually have two specific ad campaigns (or, possibly, groups of copycat ad campaigns?) in mind. One campaign contained illustrations showing a physical scenario involving barriers that the player could remove to help or harm a character, e.g. by dropping a character into lava, or by releasing that lava to destroy an enemy. The advertising campaign sent viewers to a generic match-three game, a la Bejeweled; the game appearing in the advertisements didn't exist (although some other enterprising developers actually created the game later on). Another campaign contained illustrations of a character faced with obstacles and given a selection of objects to overcome that obstacle, e.g. a character faced with a fire might be offered a gasoline can, a firehose, and a vacuum cleaner. These advertisements typically showed a player choosing the wrong item, causing the player character to be graphically injured or killed, and challenged the viewer to do better. Again, these ads typically sent the viewer to a match-three game bearing no resemblance to the advertised game. Neither of these was a situation where a developer was running an ad campaign to gauge interest in a game concept -- these campaigns ran for years (and may even still be ongoing), and were used to drive users to finished games completely different from the advertised content.

prawn 5y ago

"In one shocking instance, we are aware of a consumer who lost more than $650,000 due to one of these scams being falsely advertised as an investment opportunity on Facebook." Brutal. I'd be interested to know how much they're relying on "This was reported to Meta and they failed to act" and how much was the expectation that the publisher know which celebrities are endorsing what? Matt Damon is endorsing crypto and almost any crypto promos seem somewhat scammy, so it's not out of the question. Should a publisher know who is or isn't endorsing? I've always wondered how far you could get using lookalikes but no names. Or random people with the same name as a celebrity, but not using a visual likeness.

batch12 5y ago
Even if they don't know the endorsing parties, they should know something about whoever paid for the ad.
- prawn 5y ago
  Sure, but that could be a small agency indistinguishable from a spam operation, and is the expectation that the publisher vet each claim and endorsee? They should be able to address complaints and to prevent repeat attempts to breach this, but is stopping it altogether feasible? I don't use Facebook so maybe they already do this, but it's probably reasonable to require anyone advertising in a country to have a registered business presence within that country. But that's only going to work at scale (AdSense, FB, etc) and not with randoms putting ads on a site that anyone can see.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > and is the expectation that the publisher vet each claim and endorsee? Maybe yes? If you're paid to artificially promote some content to lots of people, even more so if there's targeting criteria associated (targeting the most vulnerable to fall for such scams) you should share responsibility? In the real world you can't hold a banner "CHEAP DRUGS SOLD HERE" without getting in trouble and I doubt the excuse of "I'm just a platform, not responsible for anything" is going to fly. > is stopping it altogether feasible Yes. Make a human review every single ad and raise the prices if necessary.

jimrandomh 5y ago

I haven't seen this on Facebook (I have ads blocked there and see almost nothing from people I don't know personally), but I see this a lot on Twitter, on YouTube, and in email spam (some of which makes it through gmail's spam filter). The scammers have fairly sophisticated tactics and a high degree of automation; flagging and blocking individual spam accounts is useless, they clearly have scripts churning them out. Fighting spam is a legitimately difficult problem. It's particularly difficult with crypto-scams, because the per-victim profit is so high that the spammers wind up well-resourced. Given that other major platforms have mostly failed to deal with the same scammers, it doesn't seem reasonable to hold Facebook-in-particular liable.

Nextgrid 5y ago
The difference between spam and this is that these are paid advertisements that Facebook happily profited from.
- jimrandomh 5y ago
  Unlikely. Given that these are scammers, they wouldn't want a trail of payment information leading to their real identities. So I'd expect them to use stolen credit cards and stolen accounts, which tends to lead to a lot of chargebacks and a net loss.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    There's some loss for sure, but given that ads are free to Facebook, even a 10% success ratio is still profit. Either way, whether it's later charged back or not, it doesn't change the fact that Facebook is initially happy to take money to artificially promote & spread this harmful content.
    - jimrandomh 5y ago
      Chargebacks aren't free; the payment processors charge a substantial penalty.

timoth3y 5y ago

Unpopular Opinion: Celebrities should be held legally accountable for the products they endorse. If a "reasonable person" can look at the info the celeb or influencer had at the time and consider it a scam or untruthful, the celebrity should face financial penalties for making that endorsement.

nojs 5y ago
I think you may have misread the headline. These scams use fake “celebrity endorsements”, the “celebrities” are not actually endorsing anything.
oceanghost 5y ago
If you hadn't heard about this one: https://hypebeast.com/2022/2/lana-rhoades-cryptosis-1-5-million-usd-nft-rug-pull https://hypebeast.com/2022/2/lana-rhoades-cryptosis-1-5-mill...
randomhodler84 5y ago
Unpopular opinion: people should take responsibility for their financial decisions. Like I’m sorry you gave all your money to a scammer, or bought the wrong coin. But that ain’t my problem. And it isn’t societies either.
- hugh-avherald 5y ago
  Pretty obvious impact on society and markets if fraud is unpunished.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    True. And nobody likes fraud. And it should be dealt with. I just have trouble having sympathy for people that willingly hand over money to obvious scams. Double your Bitcoin is a classic one. Yeah, right, elons going to double your deposit. Greedy stupid people fall for it, lose, why didn’t someone protect me.
    - 5y ago

oceanghost 5y ago

My Facebook ads are 50% crypto-scams, 40% bizarre and weird gambling games, and 10% medications. So basically 90% scams. And even the medications are probably iffy. It feels very much like the dot-com bubble to me. There is no way Facebook doesn't know about it.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago
> And even the medications are probably iffy The very foundational idea of "the advertising of medication" is worse than iffy, without getting into the entire cesspool-chain of companies behind the companies behind the advertising. Let's round it up to 100% and write to our local representatives, yeah?
- oceanghost 5y ago
  You know what was funny about a couple of them-- instructed me to "talk to my patients about" a medication. Very bad targeting there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jfoster 5y ago

I think it's understandable that big platforms face problems of scale with moderating ads & content, but one thing I've noticed is that Meta are extremely sensitive in rejecting ads due to images being imperfect or other minor things, yet Facebook & Instagram seem filled with crypto & fake IPO scams. I think they've misallocated moderation resources. On the other hand, whilst I think the ACCC is right to pursue them over this, does it have anything to do with their previous showdown? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-18/facebook-blocked-australian-news-the-inside-story/100839284 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-18/facebook-blocked-aust...

firecall 5y ago
My sense is probably not directly. Certainly there would be general political pressure to keep Big Tech in line. Australia has a history of taking tech to task: remember a decade or more ago they pulled Adobe up over local pricing! On another note, I do find it weird that Facebook Ads in AU mostly seem to be low quality brands and scams! I work in marketing and have looked after 8 figure budgets so have some industry experience. But yet I'm left wondering why I never see big brands on Facebook in AU! FWIW I do advise my clients to critically consider FB or Google Ads due to the levels of click fraud. You need serious budgets to be able to absorb the fraud and see positive ROI in AU! YMMV :-)
- airtonix 5y ago
  > But yet I'm left wondering why I never see big brands on Facebook in AU! > FWIW I do advise my clients to critically consider FB or Google Ads due to the levels of click fraud. Looks like you answered your own question! :)
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Well also some of the crypto scam ads picked the wrong dude to impersonate, someone with old fashioned values and money to fight back - Andrew Forest who started FMG mining.

nomilk 5y ago

I stumbled across one of these sponsored posts, it looked like a blatant scam but was well enough crafted that unsuspecting folk could easily fall for it. Surprisingly, some comments were >6 weeks old (meaning it had been up for at least that long), and it had hundreds of 'reactions' (hinting it had been displayed to a lot of people).

jeffybefffy519 5y ago

Do meta and google do human review of all advertisements or is it all automated?