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A survey of The Washington Post has discovered a dozen accounts, pages and groups on Facebook and Instagram that claim, wrongly, to be official hubs of Libra, the digital currency proposed by Facebook. In some cases, these pages, which were deleted only after WaPo reported them to Facebook and offered to sell Libra at a discounted price via third-party websites.
Given the proliferation of cryptocurrency scams observed in recent years, it is not surprising that fraudsters attacked Libra in view of its widespread attention. However, it is even more surprising that Facebook does not seem to have been prepared for the influx of rogues on its own service, all the more so as it has a hard time guaranteeing the regulators that it 's all right. it is equipped to handle a world currency.
Or, as Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University, put it in a commentary to The Washington Post, "Facebook is using deep irony as a platform that could undermine confidence in the motto that Facebook is attempting to introduce."
Many fake pages identified by The Washington Post use the Facebook logo, the official marketing images of Libra or the photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A page is linked to a site called BuyLibraCoins.com, which is cleverly designed and includes links to buy what it claims to be Balance tokens. Other pages seemed to have been made to reserve Libra key brand names for later use.
The fake pages appeared while Facebook is under scrutiny for its cryptocurrency projects. Last week, head of the cryptocurrency Facebook, David Marcus, appeared before a sometimes hostile committee to answer questions about Libra. "I do not think you have to launch Libra at all," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) in an exchange.
This is not the first time that Facebook has suffered an influx of cryptography-related scams, but this time, it has a lot more to lose from their proliferation. He recently accepted a settlement of £ 3 million ($ 3.7 million) in a deal with Martin Lewis, founder of the UK personal finance site MoneySavingExpert, after spreading encrypted ads on his face on the social media platform. He has also witnessed the proliferation of fake accounts attempting to promote cryptocurrency sales.
Facebook does not allow crypto-currency ads from non-pre-approved advisors. It has recently relaxed restrictions to allow more general announcements on blockchain technology or industry news.
Facebook is not the only platform victim of Scratch-related cryptocurrency scams, but it's certainly what's more to lose. The Washington Post reports that scam pages have also popped up on Twitter and YouTube, and last month The next Web reported on a fraudulent site that had registered the domain Calìbra.com (note the special character). The site was set up to look like the official website of Calibra.com, but was used to announce a "presale" of Facebook's currency. To date, the site appears to have been removed.
In response to The Washington Post Survey, a Facebook spokesman said: "Facebook is removing advertisements and pages that violate our rules when we become aware of them, and we are constantly working to improve detection of scams on our platforms."
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