Summary
Bad actors have always been a prevalent issue on the internet. You’d think that “Big Tech” has created advanced systems to catch and stop fraudsters before they had a chance to swindle money, but it turns out that things are actually taking a turn for the worse with sophisticated scam ads.
The Ads May Be Real, but What They Promise Certainly Isn’t
Most ads that I get on Facebook are actually pretty good for the most part. I’m a freelancer, so I occasionally get served ads for products that promise to simplify taxes. I also get a bunch of ads for tech products, games, and food. However, it doesn’t help things when half of the ads I get are literal scams that you typically only encounter on shady websites.
While writing this article, I got served an ad to join the beta program forGrand Theft Auto VI, which doesn’t exist. It’s asurprisingly common scam, and being aware of that, I clicked on the ad just to see what would happen, and it directly downloaded a virus disguised as a RAR file containing the game. It’s shocking how easy Facebook has made it for scammers to getpotential ransomwareon your device.
Perhaps no scam ad is worse than the ones involving celebrities. These scam ads use the likeness of famous actors and singers to promote their scam services and products. Unassuming individuals who don’t know how to recognize scams click on these ads because they trust and admire these public figures and genuinely believe that Facebook would never serve an unsafe ad.
I encountered an ad for a fake website that mimicked a real newspaper article featuring a local actor supposedly promoting a crypto exchange. It was a lengthy article with screenshots from a real interview, several hyperlinks to the exchange, and a bunch of fake comments at the end of the article.
These types of celebrity scams have beenan issue for years, but they’re getting worse with AI. While the aforementioned scam ad didn’t feature adeepfake, I’m sure that even more elaborate scams do. Since deepfakes now look incredibly convincing, it’s no surprise that people unfortunately fall for these scams.
The reason why scams are so prevalent is that Meta made it incredibly easy for anyone to get ads featured on their platforms. Almost anyone can pay for ads and get them up and running in as little as 24 hours after being (usually automatically) reviewed. Since Facebook skews older, it has a large proportion of older people that predatory individuals love to target.
Facebook’sautomated ad review and monitoring systemalso gets trained by manual reviewers, but it obviously sucks at its job. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) found that58% of all crypto adson Facebook are scams.AI imagesare also rampant, but at least those are largely limited to spreading misinformation and trolling unsuspecting grandparents.
I sincerely hope that Meta will take proactive steps to improve their ad review systems rather than wait to be compelled by a court order to do so. An automated system should only be used after it has sufficient training to catch 95–99% of scams, so Meta’s system obviously isn’t ready yet.
Until Meta can achieve a high success rate, it should take some of that money made from ads and pay human reviewers, but since scammers actually give money to Meta for ad placements, the company doesn’t have a financial incentive to do anything about the scams.
What to Watch Out For
Since advanced generative AI is so good now, you can’t trust any images or videos, especially when they involve celebrity endorsements and crypto or NFT. If an ad you clicked on downloads a file onto your device, don’t open it; delete it immediately. Also, if something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.
Ads that promote purchasable products and services often require you to give credit card information—this applies to both real andfake offers. Before you give out such sensitive information, ensure that you’re on a legitimate website by checking if it’s thecorrect URL.
