Criminals continue to scam people with fake crypto ads on Facebook using Martin Lewis’ images

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Crim­i­nals con­tin­ue to use Mon­ey Sav­ing Expert founder Mar­tin Lewis’ image to defraud investors via Face­book Ads, despite Lewis set­tling a law­suit with Facebook’s par­ent Meta over the ille­gal use of his pho­tos in such scams years ago, The Inde­pen­dent report­ed.

Criminals use Facebook ads to lure victims

Accord­ing to the report, crim­i­nals use Face­book ads to lure their vic­tims to a web­site con­tain­ing arti­cles with spu­ri­ous claims about how investors can gen­er­ate over £3,400 with invest­ments as low as £190 by false­ly link­ing them with indus­try experts like Lewis. 

One of the head­lines of the arti­cles on the web­site reads:

Spe­cial Report: Mar­tin Lewis’s Lat­est Invest­ment Has Experts in Awe And Big Banks Terrified.

Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent, a Face­book spokesper­son said the social media giant removed the fraud­u­lent ads before the news out­let brought the mat­ter to its atten­tion. How­ev­er, it is unclear how long the fraud­u­lent adverts ran before Face­book removed them.

Cryp­toSlate had pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that author­i­ties in Aus­tralia had filed legal charges against Meta for its fail­ure to curb the spread of fake cryp­to ads posts on Face­book. Also, the rich­est man in the coun­try, Andrew For­rest, had filed a law­suit against the giant tech com­pa­ny for its fail­ure to stop scam­mers from using his image to defraud people.

Crypto scams thrive on social media

Cryp­to scams on social media plat­forms are not a new phe­nom­e­non. A Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion report specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned that Meta-owned social media plat­forms Face­book and Insta­gram are the major sites used by these mali­cious play­ers to defraud their victims.

Accord­ing to the FTC report, investors lost over $700 mil­lion to rack­ets oper­at­ing on social media in 2021.

Scams on social media plat­forms usu­al­ly involve using images or videos of promi­nent per­son­al­i­ties in the space like Elon Musk, Michael Say­lor, etc., to pro­mote a fake give­away or a fraud­u­lent invest­ment scheme.

Some fraud­sters recent­ly made over $1 mil­lion by edit­ing an old video of the rich­est man in the world, Musk, and Twitter’s for­mer CEO, Jack Dorsey, at the Ark Invest’s “The ₿ Word” conference.

Such fraud­u­lent cas­es have led to increased calls with­in the cryp­to com­mu­ni­ty for these plat­forms to do more to pro­tect the indus­try by block­ing all of these mali­cious ads and bring­ing default­ers to book.

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