Martin Lewis and Facebook tackle scam ads
Money Saving Expert founder Martin Lewis has helped launch an initiative seeking to end the problem of online scam ads.
The project is a collaboration with Facebook, who Lewis began legal proceedings against after his own image was used by criminals on the social network. However, Lewis dropped the action after Facebook agreed to donate £3m to Citizens Advice and set up an anti-scam programme.
Scam ads are placed by criminals and often use fake celebrity images or endorsements to dupe people into investing in fake ‘get rich quick’ schemes called ‘Bitcoin Trader’, buying diet pills and more.
They can often lead to many people being conned out of their cash and have a serious impact on people’s mental health and self-esteem.
Facebook has now launched a new unique-to-the-UK scam ads reporting tool, accessible within the app, and supported by a dedicated team.
From today, all UK users can flag ads they believe to be scams or misleading by clicking the three dots in the top right corner of every ad on Facebook, pressing ‘Report ad’, then choosing ‘Misleading or scam ad’ and then ‘Send a detailed scam report’.
This will alert a new, dedicated, specially trained, internal operations team who will handle these reports, review and take down violating ads. That team will also investigate trends to help enforcement, and drive improvements. The tool and dedicated team are unique to the UK, as a result of the lawsuit.
Facebook hopes through this tool it will be better placed to keep pace with new types of scams and gather important feedback from UK users to understand and address this challenging issue.
“Scam ads are an industry-wide problem caused by criminals and have no place on Facebook,” said Steve Hatch, Vice President for Northern Europe at Facebook.
“Through our work with Martin Lewis, we’re taking a market leading position and our new reporting tool and dedicated team are important steps to stop the misuse of our platform.”
Facebook donated £3 million to Citizens Advice to help those who have been impacted by scammers and raise awareness of how to avoid scams.
“At a global level we’ve tripled the size of our safety and security team to 30,000 people and continue to invest heavily in removing bad content from our platform,” Hatch added.
Commenting on the launch, Lewis said the UK faces an “epidemic” of online scam ads.
“Yet disgracefully there’s little effective law or regulation to prevent them, and official enforcement is poor to non-existent, as these criminals are usually based outside of the EU,” he said.
“That’s why I sued for defamation, bizarrely the only law I could find to try to make big tech firms understand the damage their negligent behaviour has caused.
“Today should be the start of real improvement. The aim is to tap the power of what I’m dubbing ‘social policing’ to fight these scams. Millions of people know a scam when they see it, and millions of others don’t. So now, I’d ask all who recognise them to use the new Facebook reporting tool, to help protect those who don’t – which includes many who are vulnerable. Facebook’s new dedicated team will then hopefully respond quickly to ditch the scammers.”