Why Facebook Must Do More About Fake Crypto Ads

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Over the past month I’ve spoken to twelve different victims of cryptocurrency scams who’ve lost sums ranging from £250 to £180,000.

This is by no means unusual. But what has stood out is the age of some of the victims. Three were over 70 years old. One was 89.

To me their age is significant because these are people who are retired and the money they’ve lost was vital to their quality of life in old age.

At 20 you’ve got time to recoup your losses even if you’ve got longer to feel the sting from a scam. But at 89 your options are extremely limited.

One of the people I spoke to – a 70-year-old man – was having to work six nights a week just to survive after losing nearly £60,000.

This was, he explained, his life savings and all the money he had in the world aside from £200 in his bank account and a meagre state pension.

When I spoke to him early one evening he told me he hadn’t slept all day because of the stress and worry about how he was going to afford to live. He was due to go to work again a few hours later.

“I’m just tired,” he said multiple times during our conversation. “And they won’t leave me alone no matter how many times I tell them I’ve got no money left.”

This is a recurring theme with the people I speak to – the scammers are relentless. Once they feel they’ve extracted all the ready cash a victim has, they often ask them to borrow from friends and family, or even take out loans.

One person I spoke to about a year ago had lost nearly £300,000 and was being pressured into getting their elderly mother to remortgage her home. Fortunately they didn’t go through with it.

Another victim I spoke to recently who’d lost around £20,000 gave me an address of a crypto wallet they’d been sent by the scammers so he could pay them a fee.

At the time of writing it contained more than $32 million in Bitcoin. Thousands of deposits had been made into the wallet, with several dozen on the day I looked. The amounts varied from 0.005BTC to around 3BTC.

Each deposit represents a stolen livelihood and untold misery for the victim. The volume of transactions was staggering, and this was just one wallet.

One thing that’s become crystal clear from all the conversations I’ve had is that social media is a huge part of the problem, with Meta-owned Facebook being the most mentioned platform by scam victims.

I’ve lost track of the number of times a conversation I’ve had with a scam victim has started with “I saw an advert on Facebook featuring [insert name of public figure or celebrity] promoting a cryptocurrency investment…”

Among the UK-based victims I’ve spoken to recently, the celebrities who they say they have seen promoting crypto on Facebook are Richard Branson, Jeremy Clarkson, Holly Willoughby and Martin Lewis.

The scammers are using images and videos of these people to create realistic looking adverts which, to the untrained eye, seem like genuine investment opportunities. They’re made even more tempting by claims of quick and easy profits.

It’s important to clarify here that none of the people mentioned above have ever endorsed a cryptocurrency investment and would never do so.

In fact, Martin Lewis, of Money Saving Expert fame, is a vocal campaigner against scams, having once earned the dubious title of ‘the most scammed face’ because of the number of times his image was being used.

So far I’ve only talked about Facebook. But there are other platforms that I hear mentioned time and time again in connection with crypto scams, the main one being WhatsApp, another Meta entity.

Here, victims are often drawn into a scam investment after receiving an unsolicited ‘mistaken’ message from a stranger who quickly strikes up a friendship with them, often of a romantic nature.

You could argue, quite reasonably, that WhatsApp is a completely different animal to Facebook. But it’s still a huge problem that needs addressing, perhaps by giving users more information about the risks when they sign up.

However, far more action needs to be taken by Facebook both in checking adverts before they go live and responding to complaints.

I know from personal experience how difficult it is to get the scam adverts removed, having reported several of them myself over recent months.

In all but one case I received a reply from Facebook stating that the ad ‘doesn’t go against our Advertising Standards’ despite the fact that it shows a clearly doctored image of a well-known person endorsing what is obviously a fake crypto investment.

It remains a mystery as to why they’re not being taken down and in my view it’s nothing short of a scandal that Facebook is continuing to profit from this kind of activity.

AI technology is going to exacerbate the issue as it becomes increasingly sophisticated and makes it even harder to spot images and videos of people that have been manipulated.

Meta would of course say that it already spends huge amounts of money policing its platforms, and the truth of the matter is that it probably does.

But it clearly isn’t working.

Facebook users are simply not being protected enough from the scammers who are ruining thousands of lives each year by being able to advertise their schemes directly into people’s homes.

Either Meta needs to do a whole lot more to stamp out the scammers, or decision makers need to impose far harsher penalties on platforms that fail to properly protect their users.

Get in touch with The Crypto Adviser team today.