[ad_1] Jan 07, 2020 A Facebook contractor in Austin took bribes from a scammer affiliate marketer to reactivate banned ad accounts that had violated Facebook’s policy. Image credit: Anita Sanikop
A Facebook contractor took bribes from a banned affiliate marketer to reactivate the scammer’s ad accounts that had violated the social media platform’s policy, according to BuzzFeedNews .
BuzzFeed said that a worker based in Facebook’s Austin office was fired after its inquiries sparked an internal investigation.
The employee, a member of Facebook’s policy team, accepted bribes to reinstate accounts for controversial marketing company Ads Inc. which violated Facebook policies.
The scam ads included “free trials” of products falsely claiming to have celebrity endorsements, which locked unwitting victims into inflexible monthly subscriptions.
“This behavior is absolutely prohibited under our policies and the individual is no longer working with Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
“We’re continuing to investigate the allegations and will take any further necessary action.”
A former Ads Inc. employee told BuzzFeed the company had more than one person inside Facebook who would turn ads back on for a fee. Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 68: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin talks about the recent backlash against LeBron James for not speaking up for Joshua Wong and the violent Hong Kong protestors. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told BuzzFeedNews that the revelation of a Facebook employee being bribed to reactivate scam ads was further evidence of the unaccountability of platforms and the corruption endemic to digital advertising markets.
“For over four years, I have raised concerns to the [Federal Trade Commission] that behavioral advertising markets are rife with fraud,” Warner said in a statement, adding that these were “indications of large problems in the opaque, heavily concentrated, and largely unsupervised behavioral advertising market.” BREAKING: Facebook has fired an employee in its Austin office after I uncovered proof he accepted bribes from a major scammer to reactivate banned ad accounts: https://t.co/vSHxJDbTpF — Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) December 10, 2019 – not taking bribes from scammers – detecting ad accounts that are unbanned two more things we just added to the list of Facebook policies that Facebook won't enforce, so journalists have to. https://t.co/JkP9Wl5MIZ — Jeremy B. Merrill (@jeremybmerrill) December 10, 2019 !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.defer=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '1275060272584808'); fbq('track', 'PageView');
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