Facebook Launches Its First Legal Action Against 'Click Injection Fraud'

06/08/2019

The social giant Facebook is full of controversies. As a social media with the most users, it's obvious that its advantage on the market is giving it a hard time.

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other misuses, Facebook is trying to turn the table by tightening its grip on its platform from fraudsters and scammers.

This time, the company is launching its first legal action against 'click injection fraud'.

According to Facebook on its Newsroom post:

"Today, Facebook filed suit against two app developers for click injection fraud. The developers made apps available on the Google Play store to infect their users’ phones with malware. The malware created fake user clicks on Facebook ads that appeared on the users’ phones, giving the impression that the users had clicked on the ads."
LionMobi - JediMobi

What 'click injection' means here, is people creating systems to artificially generate ad clicks, and present those false engagements as true and legit engagements.

This is one of the major issues Facebook is experiencing, as it not only costs the company money, but also undermining confidence in the data that Facebook provides to its advertisers.

In its legal action, Facebook accuses two developers identified as Hong Kong-based LionMobi, and Singapore-based JediMobi.

The two companies were able to earn money from this click-injection scheme by driving fake clicks to Facebook Audience Network ads which appeared within their apps, to then earning payouts from Facebook for that engagement.

After the two companies are banned and had their Facebook accounts disabled, Facebook said that all advertisers who had been charged with those fake clicks were refunded

According to Facebook, this legal action is the first of its kind. It also highlights yet another way for the platform that is looking to stop scammers from benefiting its platform by cheating its systems.

Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs on the internet in pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising. The fraud happens when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate engagement.

This kind of fraud is nothing new, and most of the industry have actually knew their existence and are already aware of such operations. Facebook also knows that many of its users are already cheating its system by buying Likes, comments and Page followers to artificially inflate their numbers.

But what it concerned the most was that, the artificial engagements can affect ad metrics and ruin its data sets.

When Facebook presents that information to advertisers, Facebook seemed to have incentivized such cheating if it doesn't do anything about it.

Read: Facebook's First Legal Action Against Companies Selling Fake Followers And Likes