Facebook has announced that it is suing an Indian man based in Bangkok for developing, marketing, and providing cloaking software to bypass the social media platform’s advertising review process.
The little known company, LeadCloak, founded by Basant Gajjar was assisting scammers with running deceptive ads related to coronavirus, cryptocurrency, and diet pills on Facebook and Instagram.
The company was using a technique that hides the true nature of ads and presents them as something completely different to users on social media platforms.
This cloaking prevented Facebook from reviewing the ads to identify them as inappropriate and led to a wide variety of scams being advertised to social media users.
The software developed by LeadCloak targeted a number of other popular companies including Google, WordPress, Shopify, Oath, and others.
Facebook has been combating coronavirus-related scams and other fake news ads on its platform since it came under fire for allowing politicized ads that allegedly influenced the 2016 American presidential election.
The lawsuit against Gajjar and his company has been filed in the US district court in California.
Source: Reuters
