Meta Battles an 'Epidemic of Scams' as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook (opens in new tab)

User-generated 'free' content - ok, I kind of get it. The volume is insane, the product is not viable with everything reviewed.

Paid advertising though? How is it I get Facebook adverts for drugs, with pictures of the drugs, or fake money, from BLUE TICK advertisers? Obviously zero review, LLM or human.

How is it that with paid advertising they can't have one human or even a savvy LLM in the loop spend one single CENT's worth of time reviewing the adverts?

I feel like they aren't even trying. The number of times I've reported obvious stolen accounts running scams or spamming only to recieve the "we investigated and found no rules broken" has made me stop trying. Every concert listing is full of scam bots posting the exact same wording to scam people.

Given the ability to shadowban from public posting and a few hours I'm pretty sure I could write a single function to block 95% of the scams. It would be one thing if they were dealing with complex scammers but the fact is they haven't even tried to stop the very low hanging fruit that you could solve with a few regexes.

I am not shocked. I recently had a completely legitimate experience with Facebook, no fraud or anything.

My wife opened a restaurant a few months back. We're paying for Facebook ads. The early months of operating a food business is burning massive cash, so we had a ~10 dollar payment get rejected on FB ads.

Something about this rejected payment enabled all prior ad campaigns we had disabled. We are still trying to figure it out - noticed it just today. We're in for ~85 dollars in ad campaigns for just 2 days.

Every stupid bug or dark pattern which makes a big tech company money does not get fixed. It will take getting hauled in front of congress to fix it.

I tried to report a FB page of obvious car (campervan) thieves: no address, name, telephone numbers only visible on the photo (so it's more difficult to scrap/automatically detect). A lot of made up testimonials with hidden comments. The company was supposedly registered in my country but there is no way to check if it exists (we have national public registry of all companies) as no relevant data is provided. I came across the website when someone from another country not speaking my language asked me about the page and if it's legit.

FB doesn't care. There is no way to tell them what the report is about (only that it somehow violates "community standards") and they don't care to check if the company even exists.

The only thing they are battling is negative PR as they don't care to take even baby steps to prevent literal thieves advertising on their service.

Meta is or was being sued by very high net worth individuals from Australia for not blocking faked voice AI lite ads using them to sell fintech.

This wasn't some minor court case either: the person(s) have fuck you money to go the distance in the US legal system.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/19/m...

I think “battle” is a little generous given the actions Meta is actually taking. Battle implies constant action. Not allowing 32 strikes on fraudulent accounts before taking them down.

They're not battling, they're profiting from it.

We all reported an obvious scam and been told "sorry, this doesn't break our standards of community, we know you're not happy but don't give a damn".

> The report estimated organized scamming operations—often called “pig butchering” groups—comprise hundreds of thousands of people, many trafficked after falling for fraudulent social-media employment ads. Kept in prisonlike compounds, the workers are forced to work under threat of “extreme forms of torture and abuse.”

> West said the growth of this nightmarish industry stems directly from the inaction of Meta and, to a lesser extent, its social-media peers.

> “If there’s anybody who could make a huge dent here, it’s Meta,” she said. “But there’s no hammer over their head.”

This is just f'ing evil in my opinion. Meta could do something that would make a real dent in this problem, but they don't because money.

Meta is basically like a giant leaded gas or CFC factory - they just rake in money while they spew this toxic crap that society has to deal with. If Meta disappeared tomorrow I think the world would be a much better place, and despite some issues I may have with other companies, I really can't say that about any of the other Big Techs.

After reading "Careless People" when a statement comes out from Meta asserting "efforts" regarding any problem I can only think of one and only one thing: it's a lie and they don't give a s*it about it.

I overheard someone's tiktok person berating their followers for giving money to people on the internet. Apparently these same scammers are creating fake profiles of other people on tiktok as well and then friending and convincing people they should send money for this reason or that.. And similar to the article mentioning the half price ad guy getting irate customers, people were coming to this tiktok person' profile and asking for money back and then being shocked it was not the same person.

If this continues, people may actually stop sending money to people on the internet completely and not trust anything digital.

An elderly friend of my partner's family had her Facebook account hacked some time ago. Every so often, I get a friend request from an account using her avatar with the same name, but with some characters appended or some slight different spelling.

When this happens, I submit a report to Facebook and a few days later I get a message from Facebook telling me they have reviewed my report and that they've ruled that the account is not in breach of their rules.

Any lawsuit or quagmire they get embroiled in has very little sympathy from me.

I report a lot of ads some that have direct links to bank phishing sites and they seldomly get removed most of the time I get a canned we found nothing wrong with the ad response.

Is Meta still has puritain as in the past ? Do they still strike down any content that shows a hint of female skin ?

Is so, it's even more baffling that they can't strike down content with drugs.

But as the other comment say, it's hard to assume good faith from Meta - given that the scammers are paying them to display the ads.

At some point, a prosecutor will start to consider them part of a drug dealing scheme. Zuck escorted by DEA agents would make for one hell of a photo op.

I reported a scammer impersonating my grandma and they just didn't care at all. And I used to work for them! Scammer's still there years later

Practically all ads I get on Facebook are crypto scams that use AI-generated videos of politicians from my country to convince you. For ads where the page information section is available, all of them are published from the third world. I have no idea why someone from “Bangladesh” is allowed to create an ad that targets Germany and Germany only.

I've logged in into Facebook after more then 5 years of inactivity - just to delete it.

The first thing I was presented with was an AI image of some random group. I've never realised Facebook has become that bad.

This is also maybe why a lot of people cant open a FB account without getting immediately banned and demanding you either send id or take a selfie video to prove you are human.

I'm skeptical. I don't think they are really battling scams at Meta. There have been scams all over their platforms for a decade or more. This story is about trying to create the sense that they are working hard on the problem while they deliberately under invest and fail to solve it.

When you've got a scammer at the very top of the of the country, is this not to be expected? Do as they do! Everyone with the same kind of arrogant buffoon personality as Trump will be emboldened, along with the conmen who can smell rube-opportunity from the other side of the street.

This is why responsible people, or those that can maintain at least a veneer of being able to handle adult responsibilities, are required at the top of the chain for any country (and organisation that actually wants to be somewhat sustainably run). THey're meant to set a standard.

Been a long time since...

Meta can absolutely block most of the scams. Evidence: They block so many things that aren't scams. And they have a report button for scams. Nobody can convince me they don't have enough human-power to review all the things.

They apparently choose not to, because it improves engagement, or something. Periodically, they have to release this PR pretending it's not their choice, to keep the heat off the question of why they choose the way they do.

Remember the time they enabled a genocide to happen, pretended they had no idea what was going on, but internal documents were leaked showing they knew what was going on, and intentionally chose to allow it?