Facebook controversy which has provoked legal action

Facebook has well and truly irked Irish businessman and former presidential candidate Gavin Duffy, who is taking legal action against Facebook due to repeated ads appearing on the social media platform over the past 3 years, some of which claim he is dead. When clicked, the ad directs you to a fake news article.

This article claims Duffy has had tremendous success with Bitcoin before trying to lure the reader into investing. Mr. Duffy suspects the fraudsters are making a hell of a lot more out of the scam, than the £100,000 per month they are spending on ads.

How Facebook has raised immense controversy advertisement scamming

Speaking to Irish Tech News earlier this week Gavin said he was beginning to find the whole situation ‘’exhausting’’. He says calls are coming in every week to his home and business, enquiring about his funeral arrangements. ‘Naturally, this is not a 2 or 3-minute conversation to have with people who thought you were dead just a moment ago’.

However, he did note that he was not the real victim in this, as people are being scammed out of their hard-earned money. So far, the entrepreneur has spent around €40,000 on legal and cyber-security consultancy fees in an effort to put an end to these scam Facebook ads.

When asked why he is being used as the face of the scam, Gavin tells us that he was advised ‘’it is because I search well on Google in the UK, which is the scammer’s main target area for defrauding people’’. It is thought that the target audience of the ads in the UK may not know who he is. However, when they search his name there is a certain element of credibility behind him and there is no information to prove that he is not dead or involved in the bitcoin project that the ad is promoting.

As it stands, Gavin’s only course of action is to report every individual ad to Facebook, who may then remove the ad a number of weeks later. He feels that this is not good enough and said it would be a full-time job trying to police all of these false advertisements. He is seeking that Facebook change their systems, in order to ensure these ads cannot run again in the future.

The advice from Gavin’s team of experts suggests that with a few clicks of a button, Facebook could automatically cease and desist any ads containing ‘Gavin Duffy, Bitcoin or Dead’ from being approved and ran in the future. However, he tells me that they don’t want to do this as it sets a precedent for them to be responsible for the content of all future ads on their platform, instead of that responsibility lying with the advertiser. Well-known lawyer Paul Tweed is representing Duffy.

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