The site, spreading the fake news published in Facebook post is cryptocurrency startup, using the image of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern (Soraya Ardern), of course without her knowledge and consent.
About the incident told the new Zealand publication Stuff. As reported, last Friday in the feed Facebook has several posts with photos of the Prime Minister and the caption “the New investment plan for Kiwi (approx. kiwi — comic called new Zealanders). The advertising campaign was configured so that the announcement saw the New Zealand residents of different age categories.
Link in the post led to a website with fake news disguised as the well-known edition of CNN Tech. One such “news” was that the New Zealand Treasury has invested $250 million in a company called Bitcoin Revolution. “This is the future” — was summarized in about news article.
Journalists reported the post to the office of Jacinda Ardern, after which representatives of the office filed a complaint with Facebook. In response to the request, the social network has removed advertising posts.
Apparently, this is not the first case when the fake news sites use images for advertising Ardern cryptocurrency projects: press Secretary to the Prime Minister said that recently the volume of such ads has become too large and to keep track of them all fails.
“We can’t manually or programmatically monitor the growing amount of fake news who fraudulently used a photo of the Prime Minister,” commented the spokesman.
Unfortunately, the practice of fraudulent promotion of companies, cryptocurrencies, social networks became very popular, and often affects known. recently, the media has information about the fraudulent scheme of the laundering of bitcoins (BTC) through a fake Twitter account in the name of Elon musk. Links to the tweets of this account led users to a website where they were asked to send from 0.2 to 5 bitcoins to a specific address in order to obtain from 1 to 100 bitcoins.
As for Facebook, it is fraud on the platform is again possible since, as in June the social network has relaxed its policy towards cryptocurrency companies. Now the site has a special form, filling in which some of the crypto services may place ads in the feed.
