U.S. senators want to know what Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) is doing to stop crypto scams on its social media sites. Six senators sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the end of last week stating they are “concerned that Meta provides a breeding ground for cryptocurrency fraud that causes significant harm to consumers.”
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Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) all signed the letter.
About 49% of Federal Trade Commission fraud reports from Jan. 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022 involving crypto scams originated on social media. And two-thirds of those originated on one of Meta Platform’s sites, according to data cited in the letter. Instagram is the largest source for social scams, with 32% of the FTC reports originating on the site. Followed by Facebook with 26% and WhatsApp with 9% of reported cases.
Meta previously acknowledged the risk of potential crypto scams on its platforms. In January 2018, Facebook banned all cryptocurrency ads because they wanted to “make it harder for scammers to profit from Facebook,” Meta claimed at the time.
The senators say that this ban shows Meta understood the risk the content posed to users. But the company later partially reversed its ban on the ads and recently expanded the list of regulatory licenses accepted in order to advertise cryptocurrencies on Facebook and Instagram. “A higher level of…
