Scam Alert | Facebook Sponsored Ads Duping People in the Name of Cryptocurrency

By Prashant Jha

In a recent development, a new facebook crypto scam has come to light. The fraud in question uses facebook sponsored ads to target people and collect their sensitive data, which is beyond the rules and regulations set by the company.

The sponsored ad features a fake CNBC article, which claims Singapore has recently adopted a cryptocurrency as the central form of currency. The piece also boasts of several celebrity endorsements for the same, which includes business tycoon Richard Branson. The naive and gullible readers are tricked to believe that the news is authentic.

The article also has a link to one CashlessPay Group, the supposed firm chosen by the Singaporean government to develop the cryptocurrency. The fake link uses the website outlines of ORCA Alliance, tricking the users in believing that it’s authentic. The phoney website asks the users to register themselves by entering their sensitive personal information such as email address and phone number.

The fraudsters then redirect the users to another fake link which claims to be of a crypto exchange. The fake exchanges were identified to be Roiteks and CoinPro. Whenever the user lands on either of the two counterfeit exchanges, they are asked to enter their credit card details to make a pre-deposit. No matter what investment you put in, the page always shows “Transaction was not successful.”

Crypto Scams were earlier limited to Twitter where fraudsters used to impersonate a celebrity profile to dupe people of their money. However, the new Facebook scam tells us how unaware and gullible we are. The funny part is, Facebook had earlier banned any promotion related to cryptocurrencies, only to lift it in July this year.

Lithuanian musician Jonatanas Kazlauskas first posted the fake ad in question. However, his role in the scam is not clear yet, as in whether he was a part of the process or his account got hacked.

Final Thoughts

Facebook and controversy have become kind of synonym in 2018, whenever it tries to mellow down one issue, another one crops up. Mark Zuckerberg has spent most of the year in congressional hearings or replying to lawsuits and notices. Be it a flawed privacy policy endangering and making public data vulnerable or the Cambridge Analytica blunder or the recent uproar from the investors for Mark to leave Facebook; the year seems quite long for the founder of the social media giant.