Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Metaplatform
[Provided by Yonhap News TV]
Reporter Jinhyeong Park = The Australian competition authorities have sued Facebooks parent companys meta platform for neglecting and promoting fraudulent advertisements, Reuters reported on the 18th.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced that Facebook has filed a lawsuit against its parent company Meta with a local court, claiming that Facebook neglected or promoted fraudulent advertisements in cryptocurrencies to mislead users.
According to the committee, the advertisements in question steal images of famous Australian business figures, celebrities and politicians to make users believe they are promoting investment scams.
Users deceived after seeing the ad sent money to scammers, including victims of A$650,000 defrauded, the commission said.
ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said Meta knew that fraudulent ads were being posted on Facebook, but did not do enough to correct the problem.
In response, Meta said that it had technically detected and blocked these advertisements, saying that it had cooperated with the ACCCs investigation into the matter.
Earlier last month, Andrew Forust, chairman of Fortescue Metals Group, the worlds fourth-largest iron ore producer, sued Mehta in an Australian court on similar charges.
Forust said it had asked Facebook to block the ads several times as fraudulent advertisements using their image appeared on Facebook from around March 2019.
But when the ad didnt go away, he sent an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November 2019, but it still didnt work.
In September of last year, Forrust also filed a separate civil suit against Facebook in a US court.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Forrust is ranked 84th in the worlds richest people with a fortune of about $19.7 billion as of today, and is also known as Australias largest donor by donating hundreds of billions of won.
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