Facebook has also recently been the subject of a lawsuit brought by UK finances guru Martin Lewis after a slew of fake get-rich-quick adverts spread across Facebook using his name and identity.ĭespite these adverts being reported by users and subsequently removed by Facebook, another near identical advert always seems to pop-up right in its place, demonstrating that Facebook does not appear to have an effective method to detect and filter out these scams or the crooks behind them.įacebook has been heavily criticized for their often sluggish and reactive approach to removing scam adverts, especially since the social media goliath turns a profit as a result of these scams (since the scammers pay Facebook to have their adverts appear on Facebook’s Sponsored Ads platform.)Īnd it’s likely that these “unclaimed packages” scams represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the total number of fake ads being distributed to newsfeeds that ultimately attempt to lure Facebook users to counterfeit retail websites. It comes after a study by UK based consumer affairs watching Which? noted that Facebook failed to remove 26% of fraudulent adverts after users reported them. The sheer volume of adverts suggests these sites are operated by an organised network of criminals capable of maintaining thousands of Facebook ads and web domains. ![]() Yet despite the similarities of these scam adverts and their longevity on the social media site, Facebook is clearly struggling to remove them from their sponsored ads platform. Most of these sites were created using generic ecommerce templates and many offered visitors a “mystery box”. The adverts will direct users to countless web domains that, according to their public information, were only registered days, weeks or, at most, a handful of months ago. Hundreds of these scam adverts became active in the last 48 hours.Īnd the Ad Library kept revealing more and more and more. Dozens of different, but almost identically worded, adverts become active each day.Īn initial search revealed over 5000 matching adverts though this ballooned to over 6000 for a time. Most of these adverts are targeting English speaking users, and the majority were created within the last two months of writing. ![]() Other adverts also target other well known brands including Walmart. ![]() At one point the number of active adverts surpassed 6,400. However, these adverts have nothing to do with Amazon and are directing Facebook users to countless brand new web domains that appear to be operating out of China (based on their registrar data.) Such types of websites are likely to be involved with identity theft or may send out counterfeit goods or even nothing at all and will simply pocket the victim’s money.Īnd to offer some insight into the scale of the problem, we searched through Facebook’s public Ad Library – which shows exactly what adverts are currently being distributed to user’s newsfeeds – to reveal that at the time of writing there are over 5000 different adverts trying to lure Facebook users to websites falsely claiming to sell ‘unclaimed Amazon packages’. These scam adverts claim to offer products that customers have previously returned to Amazon and are now, according to the adverts, being resold at heavily discounted prices by third parties. We’ve previously reported on the “unclaimed Amazon packages” scams that have been using Facebook Sponsored Ads to appear on the newsfeeds of Facebook users. ![]() A search of Facebook’s Ad Library reveals the alarming extent to which cyber crooks exploit Facebook’s Sponsored Ads platform to proliferate their scams.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |