Facebook files a lawsuit against a person designing deceptive ad campaigns

The fight against misinformation that the tech giants are all in, is raging, but this time, rather than just banning, blocking or deleting posts or content, Facebook takes things a step further. Bloomberg reports that the social media platform has filed a lawsuit against a person who, supposedly, was behind a deceptive ad system that ran on the platform.

Allegedly, the defendant in the suit, who is an Indian citizen named Basant Gajjar, residing in Thailand, has created a company for running deceptive advertising.

The defendant has developed a “LeadCloak” software, that was designed to bypass automatic moderation systems on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and baited people into clicking unrelated to the ad links, which included all types of fake offers for diet pills, drugs and bitcoin investment frauds.

In this case, the ads were about steel spoons, but when clicked, they led to a fake news article, requesting bitcoins for countering the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, Gajjar offered his deceptive ad service to other customers at a monthly fee rate, allegedly ranging from $399 to $1,999.

Facebook has filed the lawsuit with the California court, seeking damages and requesting for a permanent block of LeadCloak services. What’s more, the deceptive ad service has allegedly also targeted Google, ad firm Oath, canadian company Shopify and WordPress.