Plus, Colin from The Markup found Meta’s Pixel tracking students on sites they have to use for school. Yep, kids’ private info sent to Facebook. Also, the top celebs used for fake news — I got the list. Tips to find spy cams and get snow alerts to your phone.
Don't fall for these fake cryptocurrency ads all over Facebook
New cryptocurrencies are constantly popping up. While Bitcoin is the most well-known crypto, others like Ethereum and Shiba Inu have steadily grown in popularity.
Lucky Block is one of the newest and ties itself to the lottery industry. However, there aren’t too many cryptocurrencies that hedge their bets on social media. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case if you believe some advertising on Facebook.
Keep reading to find out how scammers are using social media to spread ads for fraudulent cryptocurrencies.
Here’s the backstory
Have you heard about the new Meta cryptocurrency backed by Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg? If you haven’t, that is a good thing. Over the last few weeks, several advertising banners on Facebook have promoted the crypto, complete with Zuckerberg’s photo.
The ads claim the platform gives users a chance to invest in Meta cryptocurrency. And to find out more, you can read all about it on a Facebook page called Metaverse. If you didn’t know, Facebook’s parent company rebranded to Meta, with Zuckerberg announcing his intentions to build a digital world called the Metaverse.
But the crypto advertising isn’t just using Zuckerberg, as The Markup discovered. Similar ads have also popped up across social media, replacing the Facebook CEO’s face with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
If it hasn’t been made clear, these crypto ads are bogus, and there are no plans to launch a Meta-inspired cryptocurrency. With or without Musk and Bezos.
“Meta doesn’t offer any such cryptocurrency. The ads, until recently available for viewing in Facebook’s public ad library, were frauds that slipped through Facebook’s content moderation process, despite the use of Zuckerberg’s image and the company’s new logo,” The Markup explains in a blog post.
What you can do about it
Facebook and Meta have strict rules and regulations for advertising cryptocurrencies, so it is unclear how these ads made it through the review process. More Facebook incompetence, we’d imagine.
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Social media has been around long enough to see children grow into adults and young people enter middle age. Facebook launched in 2004 and has become the largest social network in the world, with billions of active users.
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Plus, Jon Keegan, an Investigative Data Journalist for The Markup, joined me to talk about personalized ads — and how Facebook, Google, and Amazon know precisely what you want. I dive into “day in the life” TikTok vids and give advice on spy-detecting tech.