Fakery and fraud: Energy scammers cast ‘wide net’ on Facebook

Fact-checkers at AFP have discovered a slew of energy-related scams on Facebook, including the sale of fake devices in the Philippines and fake incentives for solar panels in the United States.

In addition, the trend demonstrates how con artists around the world make money by spreading false information to a wide range of social media users, many of whom fall for the lure during times of high utility and energy costs and a crisis in living costs.

Brenilyn Ayachock, a 24-year-old Filipino, vented in an online video that showed her opening the power bank with a knife and letting sand pour out. She said, “What they did was awful.”

We were expecting a high-quality product, but we received this instead.

Ayachock made the purchase on what appeared to be the Facebook page of a legitimate retailer of energy devices, where environmental-friendly messages such as “turn off unnecessary lights” and “special offers” were displayed alongside “flash sales.”

Ayachock claimed that after she purchased the device for $28, or 1,500 pesos, which was a small fortune in a time of rapid inflation, the page stopped responding to her.

She reported the page to Facebook right away, but as of this week, it was still active.

As social media becomes a breeding ground for everything from bogus cryptocurrency ads to “romance” scams and hoaxes aimed at extracting people’s personal data, Ayachock is far from the only victim of “scammers follow headlines.”

As consumers struggled with prohibitive utility costs, the Philippines government issued a warning against “unscrupulous” offers to save money in the previous year.

Facebook posts that claimed to promote a fictitious “power saving” device that could reduce electricity costs were discredited by the AFP. The posts made use of doctored news reports.

The warnings were ignored, and commercial data indicates that thousands of such gadgets are sold each month. According to activists, complaints in online reviews are drowned out by comments from desperate individuals seeking cost-cutting strategies.

Amy Nofziger, director of fraud victim support at the US-based nonprofit AARP, told AFP, “Scammers follow the headlines and there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t hear about how to conserve energy, rising gas and utility prices, and the need for renewable energy.”

It’s a wide berth for con artists. Although many users are unaware of this and place their complete trust in advertisements, the majority of social media platforms do not thoroughly vet the advertisements that are displayed on their platforms.

Platforms like Facebook’s capacity to regulate paid-for scam advertising, a lucrative revenue stream, is questioned by the ease with which fraudsters bombard users with false information.

Critics, such as Patricia Schouker, a fellow at the Payne Institute in Colorado, claim that algorithms that prioritize content based on preferences have allowed scam ads to prey on users who are most likely to engage with them.

“Scams evolving”: A Facebook spokesperson stated that Meta, the company that owns Facebook, takes the “threat of scams seriously” and had taken action, such as disabling many of the ad accounts that were the source of fraud reported by AFP’s fact checkers.

The spokesperson stated, “The people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, well-funded, and are constantly evolving.”

As part of Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, AFP has a global team of journalists who dispel false information.

In October of last year, posts on Facebook claimed that Indonesia was giving away free electric bikes as a result of the government raising fuel prices. Meta claimed to have disabled the fake profiles and pages.

However, Indonesia Electric Motorcycle Community member Hendro Sutono expressed concern about the platform’s proliferation of difficult-to-detect fake electric bike shops.

According to Sutono, who spoke with AFP, “the schemers take pictures from the real stores and repost them on their cloned accounts, so they look really legitimate.”

According to Sutono, he was concerned that fraud might harm the reputation of electric vehicles to the point where people would stop using them.

Swindlers often impersonate representatives of utility companies in the United States. Last year, a company in Oregon warned its customers that “scams are constantly evolving” and that “Facebook messenger” was used by fraudsters to target some of them.

Schouker told AFP, “We see a growing number of utility front groups,” which are organizations that appear to be independent but are actually targeting their audience through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

“They spread false information while concealing their real identity,”