MoneySavingExpert’s Martin Lewis and Facebook team up to target scam ads

MoneySavingExpert’s founder Martin Lewis and Facebook are collaborating on a new partnership to tackle scam adverts on social media.

Lewis has been increasingly vocal about the effects of scam ads, after multiple ads baring his face were found on Facebook asking people to invest in bitcoin trading and the like with his apparent seal of approval.

“The first time I was drawn to this when a man accused me of scamming him out of £90,000. It was very unpleasant,” said Lewis.

“No matter what we did, he wouldn’t let me help him because I’m a scammer."

Lewis said that at one point there were thousands of scam ads featuring him on Facebook in a year, which eventually led to him filing a lawsuit against the platform in 2018 as an attempt to gain compensation for the misuse of his image.

A year later, Lewis has dropped the lawsuit and instead is now working with Facebook in an attempt to prevent scam ads on the platform.

The partnership takes a three-pronged approach. There will be a dedicated scam reporting button on Facebook ads in the UK to make it easier for the public to report this type of content.

As well, Facebook is creating a team to handle the reporting of these ads - using the data from this will go on to improve the platform’s in-house flagging system.

Finally, Facebook is donating £3 million to the Citizens Advice Bureau to facilitate the creation of Citizens Advice Scam Action (CASA) project, which will focus on helping victims and potential victims of scam ads, as well as educating the UK public to prevent these ads from having an impact.

The donation will be made in two parts: £2.5 million in cash over the next two years to fund the project, as well as £500,000 in Facebook ad credit over a three-year period to publicise CASA.

The scam button will launch in May, as well as the Citizens Advice project.

At an event today in London announcing the partnership, Lewis also took aim at other online advertising platforms, notably Google, to do more to tackle scam ads.

“Google and the rest of you, online advertising has to start to take responsibility. Real people are seeing their livelihood taken away, their life savings taken away. People are losing money that they need to live on by irresponsible advertising protocols.

“It’s about time other firms stood up, took responsibility, improved their reporting protocols and started to give money to CASA.

“I’m not ruling out another lawsuit if things do not improve,” added Lewis.

Facebook is facing criticism for not doing enough to prevent these ads appearing on the platform, particularly when it will be making money from them. When asked about this, Steve Hatch, Facebook’s regional director for Northern Europe, said the company is investing money to improve its in-house technology to recognise the ads before they are published. In the third quarter of last year, 754 million fake accounts were disabled on the platform, up from 583 million in the first quarter of 2018.

“What we aim to do is minimise the activity to the best that we can. Let's be really clear, we do not want a single pound of this on our platform. It's bad for people and it's bad for Facebook,” said Hatch.

Whether it's scam ads on Facebook or fake sellers on Amazon, unfortunately, the internet is full of fakes. The best way to prevent yourself from being the victim of a scam is education.

Google’s Jigsaw subsidiary recently released a new quiz to help people learn and identify phishing emails so you don’t get scammed into handing over your password or information to malicious parties online.

The quiz is made up of eight emails, including real phishing emails Google has seen in action, including an example inspired by the emails that tricked Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Colin Powell into giving up his email to Russian hackers which led to the Wikileaks data dump ahead of the US presidential election in 2016.

Try it for yourself and make sure to watch out for deals on the internet that are too good to be true, because usually, they are.