Martin Lewis claims to be a money-saving expert. He has fought with Facebook repeatedly regarding fake crypto ads that feature his likeness, but despite these ongoing battles, the ads keep showing up.
Facebook Is Again Facing the Music Over Phony Crypto Ads
This has been a regular thing for Facebook, which has been in trouble more times than it probably cares to admit over its lack of work in removing false crypto ads from its interface. Not long ago, the social media giant was sued by regulators in Australia over this very problem. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) brought the suit to light while Rod Sims – the chair of the organization – claimed that Facebook likely knew what was going on and did little to nothing to control things.
He stated:
It is a key part of Meta’s (Facebook’s) business to enable advertisers to target users who are most likely to click on the link in an ad to visit the ad’s landing page using Facebook algorithms. Those visits to landing pages from ads generate substantial revenue for Facebook.
Now, it looks like Facebook is in hot water again as Martin Lewis claims many new ads featuring his face have popped up on the social media platform claiming that investors can earn anywhere between 190 to 3,400 pounds a month investing in various crypto ventures. This wouldn’t be a problem except Lewis claims he hasn’t endorsed any of these platforms, nor has he given them permission to use his picture.
Facebook presently has rules in place designed to deal with situations like these. Per the company’s current policies:
Ads must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading claims, such as those relating to the effectiveness or characteristics of a product or service.
Lewis has a long and feuding history with Facebook. The first time he came face-to-face with the media giant was in 2018 through a high court legal battle when more than 1,000 crypto scam advertisements using his face or features for marketing purposes ultimately garnered thousands of dollars from unsuspecting investors who wound up sending their money to criminals.
At the time, Lewis commented:
It shouldn’t have taken the threat of legal action to get here, yet once we started talking, Facebook quickly realized the scale of the problem and its impact on real people and agreed to commit to making a difference both on its own platform and across the wider sector.
Microsoft Has Also Been Used
Facebook is not the only company that crypto scam artists are utilizing to promote their schemes. Microsoft has also been at the center of several incidents, and the enterprise has stated in the past:
We have numerous control measures to identify advertisements that do not comply with our policies and terms of services including the ingestion and blocking of the FCA unauthorized domain lists.
