While everyone is well aware of
the dangers of fake news, digital advertising in a sensitive time such as this
can contribute to a lot of confusion and chaos with fake/scam ads.
A recruitment agency in Singapore
posted fake job ads; Facebook sued a user of operating LeadCloak, a software
provider specializing in cloaking ads to promote misinformation about the economic
impact of Covid-19; An LA woman found an ad by a company selling masks that
contained her family pictures, citing all but one had died due to the pandemic.
There are ads for masks making ambitious claims about safety, bogus drugs, fake
vaccines even! The list goes on. It reminds me of the character in ‘Contagion’
who claims to have found the cure in ‘forsythia’. There is no dearth of people capitalizing
on this pandemic. Coronavirus has inadvertently given rise to online scamming
that is affecting all the big names, Facebook, Google, Amazon and the likes. It's easy to see how the implications of this information could escalate very fast, as people eagerly search for new information.
The Federal
Trade Commission has received more than 18,000 coronavirus-related
complaints, according to commission data from January through April 15.
More than half the complaints involved some type of fraud, with reported losses
of nearly $9 million.
Post Covid-19, there should be a comprehensive
interrogation of such fraud and due punishment should be put in place. And before
another situation like this arises, regulation will clearly need to step up its
game.
No comments:
Post a Comment