Fraudulent advertising: Facebook is slow to delete

One sore point in online advertising, for example, is often fraudulent advertising of supposedly safe investments, where the criminal masterminds rely on the names and faces of prominent citizens. However, some of the companies that play out these advertisements are slow to respond to reports of such fraud attempts. Meta in particular stands out negatively here, as the company Leakshield has discovered.

Among other things, the agency searches for fraudulent advertising on social networks for its clients and attempts to have it deleted. Such advertisements are placed on various platforms by major players, including Google. Particularly perfidious: The individual ad images are only active for a few hours – the official Meta Ads Library shows that these ads are only active for one to twelve hours – and are replaced in quick succession. This reduces the probability of being detected quickly and blocked at an early stage, but companies with specialized tools can do this.

If such an advertisement is reported as fraudulent, it should therefore be removed quickly. Otherwise, those who see it run the risk of falling victim to the scam.

Slow deletion despite reliable reports

Especially when it comes to reliable reports, which can be proven by a very high takedown rate, platforms that place such ads should react quickly. However, unlike Google, for example, it takes an average of around 12 days for Meta/Facebook to delete scam ads featuring Frank Thelen. If the criminals misuse the name and face of Dirk Müller, it takes another 4 days (median) for the Meta ad to disappear. Mind you, by then it is no longer active anyway.

It is incomprehensible that the MD5 checksums of the advertising images are not filtered after blocking. Leakshield notes to heise online that these are also repeated for scam ads that are placed later.

Meta still has a lot of catching up to do here. Other market competitors show that this can be done faster and in a more customer-friendly way.

(dmk)