Australia sues Facebook over scam celebrity adverts – In The News

ByCraig Haley

Another day and another lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company Meta. This time it’s Australia – or rather the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) – that’s taking the role as plaintiff.

And the subject of this latest lawsuit is also something we’ve seen time and time again. Scam adverts.

The ACCC alleges that the names and photos of prominent Australian businessmen including David Koch, Dick Smith and Andrew Forrest have been used to lure victims to fake crypto-currency and financial investment websites, resulting in Australians losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.


A webpage posing as a media article promotes a fake investment scam using Andrew Forrest’s identity.

“The essence of our case is that Meta is responsible for these ads that it publishes on its platform,” Rod sims, the ACCC chair, said.

Despite these scams proliferating in countries for years now, Facebook still allows them onto its Sponsored Ads platform where advertisers pay Meta to get their ads in front of Facebook users.


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Facebook relies on filters and detection algorithms to detect scam adverts, but rudimentary techniques such as simply changing the web address and text of the ads seems enough to bypass these algorithms to get ads approved.

It comes shortly after Andrew Forrest filed a criminal lawsuit against Facebook for the very same reason. In the UK Martin Lewis also filed a lawsuit against then-Facebook but later dropped it under the condition that Facebook worked with the Citizens Advice entity in the UK to help prevent this type of crime.

And this week the UK’s Online Safety Bill was seen in parliament that would seek to force Facebook to work harder to prevent these types of scam adverts.

All of this amounts to even more pressure on Meta to revamp the way it approves and blocks adverts on its platform. This will likely mean – or should mean – more human moderation to approve ads, especially ads that come from countries often associated with these scams such as Russia.

But until they do, Facebook is likely to face some hefty fines going forward, meaning the only question is how much damage is the company willing to take before finally realising this isn’t a problem that is going to just go away.

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