Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart has written a strongly worded letter directly to Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg angry about the lack of action being taken on Scams on the platform which are dudding thousands of Aussies of small and large amounts of money.

The letter says “Across Meta, numerous scammers have falsely used the names of prominent Australians such as Harry Triguboff, Dick Smith and me, in an effort to fraudulently solicit money from vulnerable people. These scams have also deceptively involved the names of high-profile media personalities from Channel 7, Sky, Channel 9, and others, wrongly using them in scams in efforts to scam money from innocent people.

In the last few weeks, I have had more than 750 scams on Facebook, as opposed to only one on Twitter in the same time period, hence I’d appreciate more efforts taken in attempting to address these issues.

Greater action is needed to stop scams and intentionally fraudulent content from being available and advertised to millions of Australians. And I assume, spread overseas as well.“

And Gina’s team has provided a huge number of examples of these scams.

EFTM has checked some of them this morning, and they are still running right now.

One of the Ads pointed out to Meta by Rinehart has been running since JANUARY THIS YEAR!:

Rinehart points out that “In another example this year, one Australian lost $40,000. Innocent Australians are falling victim to job scams through Facebook.

In 2021, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) reported one instance where a consumer lost $650,000 to a celebrity crypto scam on Facebook.“

Her call to Zuckerberg is clear – Facebook though it’s parent company Meta needs to do more:

“Despite our staffs concerted efforts to report such content, there remains an alarming persistence of scams, and new ones increasingly emerge.

As mentioned above, our staff cannot keep up.

Meta needs to do more.

Timely removal of scam content is crucial to mitigating its impact, and clear communication with users about the outcomes of their reports will build trust in your platform’s commitment to user safety.“

Now you might ask yourself, how is this a problem I need to worry about – this is a billionaire worried about dodgy ads using their name – doesn’t happen to me!

But think about the people in your life who might just for for these types of scams.

In some of the videos, it’s really quite clear they are fake – but as technology gets better, they will become much harder to spot.

It could be your brother or sister, your mother or father, or your grandparents falling victim to these scams.

What can Meta do?

This is the point I’ve been banging on about for weeks and months. Meta can stop this.

Firstly, using computer analysis they can determine if a video is original or not – in the case of Scammers ripping off my Infinity Games Table video review, this would stop this at the point of upload.

Secondly, any person or business should be able to register their name with Facebook and prevent it being used in the captions, videos and images posted in Ads on Facebook.

Again, this is simple. Verify the true identity of the registrant, allowing me for example to register my name and image on Meta, once done, any reference to me would come to me for approval first. If I was to ever do a brand deal that allowed someone else to use my name or image, I could approve it.

It’s exactly the same as when your friends upload a photo of you – Facebook knows this, and you can have the option to allow the tag or not.

Without any action from Meta, one can only assume they are just happy to accept the likely millions of dollars in revenue from scammers.

This should be an absolute priority for Meta, and in doing so, should set a precedent for all social media companies.

It’s that simple.