A billionaire from Australia, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest is taking the social media giant, Facebook, to court.
He indicates that there were scammy cryptocurrency ads that used his name to defraud victims. According to Forrest, the false cryptocurrency advertisements are against Australia’s money-laundering laws.
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The Australian billionaire did try to distance himself from the scam when it first started being promoted on Facebook, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Forrest lawyers do not know the number of individuals defrauded by reason of this scam, since the area of the harm is immense.
The court documents do show that the scam defrauded victims out of millions of dollars. Therefore, one Australian victim lost $952,00 AUD as a result of falling for the scam.
“These scenarios played out in the underlying scam which used Dr. Forrest’s name, likeness, and reputation to find victims, who often reported being swindled after believing Dr. Forrest was actually endorsing the investment scheme.”
Forrest requested to not use his picture to promote cryptocurrency scams in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in November 2019, prior to giving the criminal charges.
Facebook failed to take down false ads on the platform, and as Forrest claims, Facebook was “criminally reckless”. Even the money-laundering laws were breached by not doing enough to stop the scams. He said:
"World-first" action on behalf of "everyday Australians" to protect their savings from being "swindled away" by scammers."
He intends on protecting people around the world from similar schemes:
"I want social media companies to use much more of their vast resources and billions of dollars in annual revenue to protect vulnerable people — the people who are targeted and fall victim to these horrible scams with their hard-earned savings."
Facebook might face fines and be obligated to change its advertising functioning. There is a separate lawsuit with the Superior Court of California, however, the case is still pending.
Furthermore, the court hearing in the Western Australian Magistrates should take place on March 26th (a commitment hearing should happen later in 2022). Furthermore, the charges have been brought under Part 10 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, with the consent of the Commonwealth Attorney-General.
There was another incident back in 2019 when Forrest and other Australian celebrities were falsely quoted giving testimony for a fraudulent cryptocurrency. The scam used fake news to promote a fake Bitcoin investment platform.
In total, investment scams (50% crypto scams) cost Australian investors approximately $50.5 million over the span of six months.
