Key takeaways:
- The Western Australian District Court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Australian billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest against Meta.
- Scams are not welcomed on Meta’s platforms, and the company will “work tirelessly” to stop them and “protect our users,” a representative for Meta told Reuters.
The Western Australian District Court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Australian billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest against Meta.
Forrest said innocent people lost a lot of money as a result of fake cryptocurrency advertisements featuring his image on Meta platforms. The prosecution claimed there wasn’t enough proof.
According to the Commonwealth Criminal Code’s anti-money laundering provisions, Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals and the second-richest person in Australia, personally filed criminal charges against Meta in February 2022. He claimed the social media behemoth “knowingly profits from this cycle of illegal ads” and neglected to remove the offending content. To file the lawsuit, he needed the Australian attorney general’s assent.
In November 2019, Forrest urged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter that the company, which runs Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms, remove false ads and stop people from misusing his image.
In December 2023, Meta entered a not-guilty plea to the accusations. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions’ spokeswoman informed Reuters that the lawsuit had been dismissed due to insufficient evidence, but she did not provide any other details. Forrest sent The Guardian the following statement:
“It shows that Facebook is beyond the laws of Australia, that hardworking Australians are not protected, and that scams will continue to run rampant with no recourse for those who are duped by increasingly sophisticated technology on social media platforms that take no responsibility.”
Scams are not welcomed on Meta’s platforms, and the company will “work tirelessly” to stop them and “protect our users,” a representative for Meta told Reuters.
Citing six charges, Forrest filed a civil lawsuit against Meta in California’s Northern District Court in June 2022, alleging that Facebook’s self-help advertising interface materially assisted con artists in creating advertisements. In January, Meta submitted a move to dismiss that lawsuit.
Since Forrest’s billionaire took action against Meta, scams utilizing his picture have persisted. In February, Cybertrace discovered deepfake pictures of Forrest in Facebook advertisements.
Google’s parent firm, Alphabet, filed a lawsuit against two individuals in China on April 4, alleging that they were the source of fraudulent apps that had been downloaded more than 100,000 times from the platform.
