In a large leak from a fraudster network received by Assignment Review, there are internal cost calculations that reveal the network’s budget for marketing: almost SEK 13 million – a month. Part of it ends up at META when the fraudsters buy advertising space on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Meta.
Bluff articles on social media are one of the fraudsters’ foremost weapons to attract new victims. Often pictures of celebrities are used together with sensational headings where they are alleged to have made money on various investments.
– For me, meta is almost more fierce than the villains. Because I know that the villains are looking for fraud. Meta pretends to be a regular company, but then they are doing this crap, says football journalist Olof Lundh, who is often used in the scam articles.
See the program “The Empire of the Frauds” on SVT Play
Clone news sites: “a democratic problem”
The fraudsters clone real news sites, so that the fake items appear to be published on, for example, Aftonbladet or SVT. Following Assignment Review’s disclosures Requires the interest organization publishers to meta reports what measures they take against crime and what revenues the company has from scam ads.
– The bluff ads damage the journalistic credibility of the media whose well -known brands are falsified. They hurt the credibility of serious Swedish news journalism at all, which is extra serious at a time when society is exposed to constant digital disinformation campaigns in order to create polarization and political instability. So, Facebook’s bluff ads are also a democratic problem, says Stefan Eklund, CEO of the publishers.
The experiment: “looks very bad”
The criticism of Facebook’s owner Meta and other social media is not new. Meta claims that they have now improved its routines around the bluff ads. “It is contrary to our policy to publish ads that promote or facilitate fraud,” Meta writes in a comment on Assignment Review.
We let IT security expert Karl Emil Nikka investigate how things have gone. For a month, he maps the fake articles and examines how Facebook handles them he reported.
– It looks very bad, says Karl Emil Nikka.
See the results in the video above.