Scams on Facebook and Instagram designed to look like they’re from prominent people in Russia aren’t rare. Last fall, Russian users reported multiple announcements featuring photographs of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who is now working to launch his own blockchain platform.
Scammers started a massive ad campaign in Durov’s name, using the slogan “I won’t let Russians suffer,” trying to con people out of money under the pretext of earning profits on cryptocurrencies. Another example involved video ads from an account called “Yuriy Dud.”
Yuri Dud is a journalist and popular YouTuber Yuri Dud. His latest video creation, a remarkable report on the HIV epidemic in Russia, racked up 13 million views just one week after its release on February 11.
The scam videos using Dud’s name and pictures promoted a contest to win 2 million rubles ($31,480). They included hyperlinks to a website where users completed a survey before they were promised “a guaranteed prize” of at least 60,000 rubles ($945) and a maximum award of 2 million rubles. To collect this money, people were asked to make a “securing payment” of a few hundred rubles that would supposedly be returned.
Karen Kazaryan, the chief analyst at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, told Meduza that moderating scams isn’t a top priority for Facebook because they simply appear too often.
“Facebook has only a small number of moderators for Russian-language content who are already overloaded with filtering the Russian-Ukrainian segment, tracking ‘Russian trolls,’ and also moderating more dangerous content, like child porn and videos containing violence and cruelty. As a result, they simply lack the resources and they probably don’t want to spend money on it because they don’t see a point, since it doesn’t hurt the reputation of Facebook and Instagram,” said Kazaryan.
According to Kazaryan, the situation will improve only if Facebook radically changes its advertising policy to upgrade the instruments it uses for the automatic moderation of posts, or if the company opens an office in Russia. In such a case, the company would be required to observe Russian advertising laws, which impose liability on advertisers for fraudulent advertisements, the analyst believes.
This is an adapted version of an article which first appeared on Meduza.
