Drowning in scams

Russian Facebook and Instagram users keep seeing their beloved celebrities and trusted journalists in fake ads that try to steal their money

Russian Facebook and Instagram users recently started seeing scam advertisements that were made to look like they came from journalist and popular YouTuber Yuri Dud. For example, some video ads from an account called “Yuriy Dud” promoted a contest to win 2 million rubles ($31,480). The content was created by splicing together footage from Dud’s official YouTube channel to create the impression that he was organizing the competition himself.

The videos included hyperlinks to a website where users completed a survey before they were promised “a guaranteed prize” of at least 60,000 rubles ($945) and a maximum award of 2 million rubles. To collect this money, people were asked to make a “securing payment” of a few hundred rubles that would supposedly be returned. This initial transfer was necessary, participants were told, in order to confirm individuals’ identity and “secure an internal account for further transfers.” The legal terms published on the website, however, state that the surveys are a paid service: “In order to access paid surveys, users pay for premium-level access.” According to WHOIS, the network of websites using this scam were registered between December 2019 and January 2020 to individuals whose names are not disclosed.

Yuri Dud told Meduza that he first noticed these ads appearing on social media in October 2019. “We contacted Facebook’s administrators and they offered to help, but they warned that ‘scraping out’ stuff like this takes time. And it’s been like that. Every couple of weeks, a new thread appears on a new page and we file a complaint. After a while, it disappears,” says Dud, who alerted his audience several months ago about the ads. “And we’re warning them again now: We don’t promote contests, surveys, or anything where people have to pay to participate,” he says.

Scams on Facebook designed to look like they’re from prominent people in Russia aren’t rare. Last fall, Russian users reported multiple announcements featuring photographs of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who is now working to launch his own blockchain platform. Scammers started a massive ad campaign in Durov’s name, using the slogan “I won’t let Russians suffer,” trying to con people out of money under the pretext of earning profits on cryptocurrencies. Some of these ads on Facebook featured late-night talk-show host Ivan Urgant and Yuri Dud supposedly encouraging users to get money for taking a survey. One photograph showing TV anchor Andrey Malakhov posted to a fake Rossiya-1 network account promoted a fictional presidential order supposedly “awarding compensation to all Russian citizens.” The money was only available, of course, if you paid a small commission fee.

After Meduza contacted Facebook about the most recent scam, the ads featuring Yuri Dud were taken down. “We’ve long been using systems to remove ads that violate Facebook’s rules, and we continue to do all we can to solve these problems, investing more and more resources in this work. We deleted these advertisements and the accounts used to launch these ads. We urge people to report such cases of fraud,” a Facebook representative told Meduza.

Karen Kazaryan, the chief analyst at the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, told Meduza that moderating scams isn’t a top priority for Facebook because they simply appear too often. “Facebook has only a small number of moderators for Russian-language content who are already overloaded with filtering the Russian-Ukrainian segment, tracking ‘Russian trolls,’ and also moderating more dangerous content, like child porn and videos containing violence and cruelty. As a result, they simply lack the resources and they probably don’t want to spend money on it because they don’t see a point, since it doesn’t hurt the reputation of Facebook and Instagram,” says Kazaryan.

According to Kazaryan, the situation will improve only if Facebook radically changes its advertising policy to upgrade the instruments it uses for the automatic moderation of posts, or if the company opens an office in Russia. “If an office opens here and they start selling ads officially, then the company would be required to observe our advertising laws, which impose liability on advertisers for fraudulent advertisements,” he says.

Story by Maria Kolomychenko

Translation by Kevin Rothrock