After failing to get a response from Meta, Lithuanian institutions are planning to turn to the European Commission about fraud and fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
The appeal is being prepared by the Communications Regulatory Authority and the parliamentary Committee on Culture. The goal is to inform the EC about Meta’s possible breaches of the Digital Services Act due to its failure to guarantee consumer safety.
On Wednesday, Debunk.org, a disinformation analysis centre, informed members of the parliamentary Committee on Culture about a study it had carried out on large-scale fraud, brand theft and the creation of fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
According to the centre, scammers create clones of social media accounts of popular media outlets, celebrities and companies. These are then used to promote get-rich-fast scams and fake investment platforms in order to get people’s personal information and bank account details.
“This is huge reach, a huge problem, and it’s not being addressed,” Viktoras Daukšas, analyst and head of Debunk.org, said during the committee meeting on Wednesday.
All the participants pointed out that Meta has failed to take any action to fight scammers and usually does not react to reports of abuse.
“Meta’s non-cooperation is the biggest problem. If they removed everything, it would all be fine and there would be no complaints,” MP Vytautas Kernagis, a member of the Culture Committee, said.
Suspected criminal group
Debunk.org has been monitoring the situation since the beginning of this year and says it has found 118 websites that impersonate mainly Lithuanian media outlets, and also 124 social media accounts that are used to impersonate media and publish false advertising.
Scammers have impersonated LRT, LNK, Delfi, InfoTV, the Estonian national broadcaster, the largest Estonian newspaper, Ignitis, Swedbank and other banks operating in Lithuania. People have been invited to invest via fake investment platforms.
Daukšas says the scammers copy the impersonated websites to perfection. When users click on an ad on social media, they are redirected to a clone of a trusted website with links to investment platforms. Users are thus tricked into disclosing their data.
The study found 1,144 false advertisements on social media, displayed more than 10 million times.
“At least half of all Facebook users in Lithuania have seen these ads,” Daukšas pointed out, adding that Meta receives revenue from the ads.
“A criminal group may be behind this scheme as we are talking about a large amount of resources. This is not the work of a single person, it is a hired team of call centres, programmers, marketers that are promoting this. It’s huge infrastructure,” he said.
Lina Bušinskaitė, head of the Internet Media Association, says cloning of websites could pose a threat to national security.
According to the Police Department, around 4,000 investigations into online financial fraud have been opened this year.
No response from Meta
Participants of the committee meeting stressed that it was impossible to fight fraudsters without the help from Meta, which has the information needed to catch criminals. Websites have repeatedly asked Meta to block their clones but there has been no response, Bušinskaitė said.
The Lithuanian government has sent Meta at least two letters about the problem but there has been no response, Daukšas claimed.
According to Vygantas Vaitkus, a member of the Communications Regulatory Authority, the Digital Services Act came into force in the EU earlier this year and provides tools to deal with such problems.
“The EU-wide system is in place. Meta is subject to it since the end of August. It covers all the obligations on content removal and the fines that the EC can impose, which can reach up to 6 percent of annual revenue. This is an instrument that we should use,” he said.
Vaitkus said that the Communications Regulation Authority plans to send a letter to the EC in the coming weeks and inform it about problems related to fraud on social media.
“We have to make full use of this instrument today, which is to work with the EC. [...] This would probably be one of the most effective ways to address this situation and ensure that it does not happen again in the future,” he said.
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