By Aisha Dow
The Albanese government will probe whether Meta has unlawfully promoted scams on its platforms, as the social media giant continues to take advertising money from criminals pushing blatantly fraudulent schemes on Facebook that target vulnerable Australians.
Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones said he had asked his department and office to examine whether Meta was breaching existing laws, including its criminal and civil obligations.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones wants to examine if Meta has broken laws.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
“Every hour that a scam ad is live on a Meta platform causes harm,” Jones said.
“It’s not good enough that they don’t have a system which enables blatantly criminal material to be removed.”
Jones’ comments came after this masthead published an investigation showing Meta was serving up ads promoting notorious sham investment platforms subject to numerous official warnings and easily identified with a simple search.
Despite the tech company’s insistence that it had since removed many offending ads and accounts, new ads appeared in recent days using the same techniques and keywords as before.
Among the ads published this week were examples misusing the images of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, singer Guy Sebastian and those linked to a bogus Salvation Army loan offer.
There were also numerous ads promoting Quantum AI, which the consumer watchdog has labelled the “most prolific online investment trading platform scam” affecting Australians.
An image of the PM in a recent fake Salvation Army ad. Scammers behind these types of ads often seek to steal people’s personal information.Credit: Meta Ad Library
Meta did not respond to questions about the ongoing scam ads by deadline.
Earlier, the company shared news it had recently taken down 2 million accounts linked to scam centres in South-East Asia and the Middle East. It also confirmed that it had been sharing warnings with Australian Facebook users since October, telling them to “beware of scams using celebrity images to deceive you”.
Sergeant Alexander Kazagrandi, with the Australian Federal Police’s Joint Policing Cybercrime Co-ordination Centre, said scam advertising was prolific in Australia and was being used “more and more extensively by organised criminal groups”.
He warned that these ads were being used not just to recruit victims but to traffic people into South-East Asian scam call centres by offering them an easy way to make money.
“That is essentially the same hook that is being used for Australian victims for investment scam purposes,” Kazagrandi said.
A scam ad featuring singer Guy Sebastian. When this screenshot was taken, the ad had been live for 13 hours.Credit: Meta Ad Library
Last week, new federal scam laws that are set to force social media platforms, banks and telcos to pay compensation to scam victims were debated in parliament.
Some MPs and consumer groups are concerned the bill does not go far enough, arguing it will remain far too difficult for victims to be reimbursed.
Kazagrandi said more than 90,000 reports about cybercrime and scams were made to ReportCyber last year, a high proportion of which were investment scams.
“On average, an investment scam in Australia will net about $81,000 to the criminal,” he said.
Kazagrandi said Australians could expect to hear more about Australian police conducting raids and targeting overseas scam operations in the future, as its ongoing Operation Firestorm investigated cybercriminals based in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe.
In July, Melbourne woman Anna was feeling stressed and vulnerable when she saw an ad on Facebook falsely claiming to feature Albanese talking about a new investment platform purportedly backed by his government.
All Anna had to do – at a time when her husband had left her for another woman, and she was struggling to pay off the mortgage alone as she worked long days as an office administrator – was put in $250.
“I just click … [and] I fill out the application because I was thinking, ‘$250 I can afford’,” said Anna, 61, using a pseudonym.
The advertisement was a scam, using a manipulated video of Albanese without his permission, and it connected Anna to ruthless scammers who fleeced her of $30,000 over the coming months, pushing her even further into debt.
Anna said the scammers, who claimed to be from England and worked for a company called I2 Trading, tricked her into believing she was making profits on her trading, enough to pay off her mortgage. It wasn’t until she couldn’t withdraw her profits that she realised it was a con.
She hadn’t seen the scam warnings previously.
“I work full-time, I get home, I don’t watch the news,” she said.
The mother of two, who is being assisted by the Consumer Action Law Centre, said the scammer also advised her to approach a digital lender for a loan of $30,000, coaching her to tell them the money was for home renovations.
Anna says she is now paying an interest rate of 9.69 per cent on the borrowed money. It means the scam is going to cost her more than $40,000 over seven years.
She said she was kept awake with the thought of what she might have done with the money she pays into the loan each month – perhaps a holiday, something for her house, or to fund a more stable life.
“I’m struggling,” she said.
Monash University Professor Mark Andrejevic, who has researched the types of Facebook ads reaching Australians, said it was pretty clear that Meta was not policing its ads carefully.
“It’s easy to find these ads,” he said. “There are a number of indicators, including keywords, the characteristics of the pages that are serving them, and the use of multiple administrators across several countries. When taken together, an automated system should be able to flag this type of advertising easily.”
Andrejevic said regulatory change was needed or scams would be a persistent part of the online ad environment.
“It doesn’t look like Facebook is making much off of each individual ad buy, but if you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of these are appearing globally, the revenues could be more than just a blip.”
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