Playing ‘Whack-a-Mole’ with Meta on my fraudulent avatars

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I have a alter ego Or, as is known on the Internet, an avatar. My avatar seems to me and sounds at least a little like me. Appears constantly on Facebook and Instagram. Companys who understand social media much better than I tried to kill this avatar. But so far, at least they have failed.

Why are we so determined to finish this plausible version of myself? Because it is a fraud: a “Deepfake”. Worse, it is also literally a fraud – trying to get people to join a group of investments they supposedly lead. Someone has designed it to deceive people, exploiting new technologies, my name and my reputation and the FT. It must die. But can we kill it?

I was first introduced to me in my avatar on March 11, 2025. An ex -collega paid attention to my existence and immediately brought it to that of FT experts.

It turned out that I was in an ad on Instagram for a group of WhatsApp supposedly led by me. This means that Meta, who owns the two platforms, indirectly made money with fraud. This was a shock. Someone was directing a financial fraud on my name. It was so bad that the finish line came out.

My expert colleague contacted a goal and, after a little “in in in and froing,” he got the infractors to retire. Unfortunately, this was far from the end of the adventure. In the following weeks, several people, some of whom I knew personally and others who knew who I am, paid more attention to me. On each occasion, after being notified, Meta told us that it had been demolished. In addition, I recently enrolled in a new Goal that uses facial recognition technology to identify and eliminate these scams.

In total, we felt that we put ourselves at the top of this evil. Yes, it had been a bit like “Whack-a-Mole”, but the number of moles we see seemed to be low and falling. Since then, this has been wrong. After examining the relevant data, another expert colleague recently told me that there were at least three different Deepfake videos and several photoshopped images with more than 1,700 ads with small variations on Facebook and Instagram. The data, from the Meta Ads Library, show that the ads reached more than 970,000 users only in the EU, where the regulations require technological platforms to report these figures.

“Because the ads are all in English, this probably represents only part of their global reach,” my colleague said. Many more accounts in the United Kingdom allegedly saw them.

These ads were acquired by ten fake accounts, with new ones after some were banned. This is like fighting hydra!

That’s not everything. There is a painful difference, between knowing that social media platforms are used to disappoint people and be an involuntary part of this scam. This has been a shock. So, how, I wonder, is it possible for a company like a goal with its huge resources, including artificial intelligence tools, cannot identify and demolish these fraud automatically, especially when reporting their existence? It is really so difficult or they do not try, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in his excellent book Sloppy people?

We have been in contact with the officials of the Department of Culture, the Media and Sport, who directed us to the Policies of AD of Meta, that states that “Ads should not promote products, services, schemes or offers through misleading or misleading practices identified, including those aimed at scamming people with money or personal information.” Similarly, the online security law requires platforms to protect fraud users.

A spokesman for himself said: “It is against our policies to supplant public figures and we have eliminated and deactivated the ads, accounts and pages that are shared with us.”

Meta said in self-sculpture that “scammers are relentless and continuously evolving their tactics to try to evade detection, which is why we are constantly developing new ways to hinder scammers to deceive others, including the use of facial recognition technology.” However, it is difficult to believe that the goal, with its great resources, could not do it better. You just should not spread these frauds.

In the meantime, be careful. I never offer investment tips. If you see this ad, it’s a scam. If you have been the victim of this scam, share your experience with the FT to Visual.investigations@ft.com. We need to remove all the ads and therefore know if Meta is heading at the top of this problem.

Above all, this type of fraud must be stopped. If you can’t do it, who will do it?

martin.wolf@ft.com

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