“Élise Lucet’s performance on television ended in tragedy” or even “Francis Cabrel risks prison after he revealed his secret on live TV”: false press articles with outrageous titles and fake interviews with celebrities are being massively distributed to Internet users on social networks in mid-March, via sponsored publications. These fake news aim to promote online investment and cryptocurrency sites.
To attract clicks, these false articles invent statements or incidents around popular personalities such as Vincent Cassel, Francis Cabrel, Cyril Lignac, Élise Lucet or even Jamel Debbouze. The latter thus appears handcuffed by the Australian police, on the grounds that an “error cost him his career”. This is actually a montage made from a news agency photo, showing the arrest of a protester in Sydney during an anti-lockdown rally in 2021.
But by clicking on the link of the publication, the Internet user finds himself faced with a false article from the daily Le Monde, supposed to reveal an easy enrichment tip on the Internet revealed by Jamel Debbouze during a television appearance on the program “Quotidien “. A ruse so effective that it would cause him to be “sued in court” today by the Bank of France, again according to this story. But it is invented from A to Z, Jamel Debbouze never having made the remarks attributed to him in this alleged transcription of his appearance on the show in 2017.
If this phenomenon begins to affect the social network , interviewed by AFP. These campaigns – in order to “create legitimacy and try to attract clicks – have put in place mechanisms for counterfeiting brands or false declarations of personalities with very catchy titles in regular advertisements on the platform (from ) Meta,” he detailed.
This content includes several codes from previous scam campaigns carried out on the platform, whether it is “Facebook Hustles”, revealed in an investigation by the anti-disinformation group CheckFirst, or a set of 242,000 false pages Facebook spreading pro-Kremlin content such as financial scams, revealed by the NGO specializing in digital subjects Reset.
“The fraudulent ads used different tactics to gain traffic on Facebook, such as deceptive redirects, typosquatting (the use of publicly recognized site domain names) and misleading home pages. All of these practices are prohibited in Meta’s spam policy,” summarizes the Reset report.
These sponsored advertisements also lead the advertiser to pay Meta and X in order to make them more visible and targeted. Contacted by AFP, the Meta group limited itself to indicating that its “teams remain determined to continue their work to delete content and accounts” that violate its rules. The deceptive practices in force on the platform can, however, have significant consequences, for Alexandre Alaphilippe: “Facebook users are not safe on the platform because they can be fooled and give money to cybercriminals. »
On X, many users deplore the omnipresence of this misleading content promoted in their news feed, some even denouncing a form of “harassment”.
Faced with the scale of the misleading publications concerning her, Élise Lucet, presenter of Cash Investigation, denounced a “scam” and called on her subscribers to be wary of these promotions for “cryptocurrency sites”. The Le Monde group, for its part, indicated to AFP its intention to file a complaint against X for “digital identity theft and trademark counterfeiting”.
