
Facebook fired an employee who was paid bribes to reactivate banned ad accounts - coloneltcb
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-fired-employee-bribed-ads-inc
======
lwb
> Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told BuzzFeed News that the revelation of a
> Facebook employee being bribed to reactivate scammy ads was further evidence
> of the unaccountability of platforms and the corruption endemic to digital
> advertising markets.

I'm confused. If anything, this seems to me like evidence that Facebook _is_
holding people accountable for violating regulations on the platform.

~~~
mehrdadn
I never understood why firing is seen as sufficient punishment for bad actors
inside a company. There are so many situations where the payoff is still much
higher even if you get fired.

~~~
stickfigure
What more do you want? Criminal prosecution for violating Facebook's internal
policy?

~~~
onion2k
I want a law that would make Facebook liable for the actions of their staff.
The goal of such a law would push the company to implement measures to make
individual bad actors have very little power to do bad things. In this case,
simply having a requirement that several independent people (maybe in
different offices) review a case before unbanning an account wouldn't be
completely unreasonable.

~~~
mliker
That law would need to be applicable to all companies - Walmart, Target, Visa,
etc.

~~~
sharkjacobs
this law is sounding better and better

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unnouinceput
<Quote>: "“Holy shit lol,” said the partner.

“Ya,” Burke replied, punctuating his message with the sack of money
emoji.</Quote>

Heh, amateurs. Let me tell you guys a story from my country, from 90's. So in
those years cell phones started to become the norm. You know, those Nokia
brick types (which had like 1 week of battery in them before requiring
charging) but the service was like this. You would call your contact then
around 4 or 5 rings will give you plenty of time to close the call, and after
that a voice mail message would inform you the contact was not answering and
inviting you to leave a message. Problem was that if you went that far, then
you'd pay for those seconds when the automated voice mail be initiated just
like if your contact would've answered. So far so good. But one CEO of a cell
company decided he wanted money. So randomly, he would enable the automated
voice mail message to enter just after one ring. Now, individually that was
not expensive, around few cents for each subscriber, but on the whole network
this would mean for every hour this trick was pulled the company would win one
million dollars (yes, you read that correctly).

~~~
Chinjut
This trick would hit tens of millions of subscribers every hour?

The number of subscribers and frequency of their calls required to achieve
this in the 90s seems difficult.

~~~
unnouinceput
Eastern Europe country, so when we finally broke off Russia we went to
implement very fast Western technologies. This also coupled with the fact that
during Communism era fixed phone were something to wait years to be approved
off made cell phone penetration extremely fast. People were starving for
communication so it didn't matter that we barely had food, we still wanted
cell phones.

And not ten of millions, just ten is enough. Call your family and few friends
under this trick and oops, you're good to pay an extra dollar at the end of
the month.

~~~
Chinjut
I said tens of millions since you said it was a few cents for each subscriber,
but one million dollars for every hour. (Perhaps I did not read that
correctly?)

~~~
unnouinceput
Yeah, I meant that each time you get that voice mail you'd pay a few cents. If
my memory serve me correctly was 5 cents for initial 20 seconds and then 1
cent for each 10 seconds after that.

As a side anecdote, cell companies started a war among themselves with
different features to lure customers from one network to another, and one of
those features was at one time that initial 3 seconds were free, and after
them it kicked the normal fees. So here I was a student in University campus
and absolutely every single student had a cell, but you'd call your friends
something like: "Hi X, it's me Y" and click, close the phone. Then call "I
need this course" and click, close the phone. And so on and so forth until
you'd finish your conversation. And at the end of the month when cell company
was issuing the bill, you'd receive a very thick envelope that would have like
50 pages in it and the majority of it would read like this for each row:
<destination number> \- <begin time> \- <duration> \- <price>, where
<duration> would be something like 1 second or 2 seconds, and <price> would be
"free". It didn't last, cause companies understood they were losing money by
printing those pages so it was a feature for like couple of months, but oh boy
that was fun. Good times.

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danso
OK it's not surprising that rogue insiders – whether it's a regular ads
employee, manager, or a site-reliability engineer – can attempt this kind of
tampering. It _is_ surprising that FB – who, if anything, is excellent at data
and tracking – seems to lack seemingly basic access controls and detection
mechanism to prevent this. According to BuzzFeed, FB only launched an internal
investigation after BF asked questions about this employee:

> _A company spokesperson confirmed that an unnamed employee was fired after
> inquiries from BuzzFeed News sparked an internal investigation. The employee
> in question was based in the company’s Austin office, according to
> information obtained by BuzzFeed News._

The article doesn't say exactly [0], but potentially a BF reporter might have
noticed that scammy ad accounts that BuzzFeed _previously_ reported on [1] –
which FB then banned in response – were inexplicably active again. But why
doesn't FB have an internal flag/bit for these _egregiously_ scammy ad
accounts (and their unique identifiers) in their systems? A flag that would
trigger an automated notice/audit when that account was reactivated for any
reason, by any employee?

[0] It's possible the article under discussion was completely sparked by
insider leaks to the BF reporter, e.g. _" chat messages obtained by BuzzFeed
News"_. I'm just saying that it's possible that the rogue activity potentially
seems to have been observable by any outsider, i.e. completely observable and
preventable if Facebook had proper access control.

[1]
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-
subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc)

~~~
imron
> OK it's not surprising that rogue insiders – whether it's a regular ads
> employee, manager, or a site-reliability engineer – can attempt this kind of
> tampering.

In this case, it was a "contractor". Next time, it will be an "intern" etc
etc.

~~~
lainga
"On Sunday, an _unidentified wrecker_ sent by the Imperialist powers to
humiliate Facebook..."

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brenden2
To be fair, Facebook itself accepts bribes from spammers all the time in order
to put ads in front of people who probably don't want to see them.

~~~
koheripbal
It's common for these tech companies to set different ethical standards for
paying customers.

... as another example, Indeed does not action/review companies that have been
flagged as having inappropriate postings (i. e. MLM scams) as long as they
have actively billed job postings.

This is evidenced by the fact that when such a company removes their automated
payment and/or pauses all job listings, all the flags then get reviewed and
actioned (speaking from personal experience - not MLM, but commission based
job listings).

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tempsy
Will never not be surprised by how little people will accept to ruin their
lives. $5k? Really?

~~~
catalogia
This morning I saw somebody riding their bicycle without a helmet. They could
die like that, and for what? A moderate sensation of comfort?

Obviously they perceived the risk as low.

~~~
matkoniecz
Note that bicycle helmets are not very useful at improving outcomes.
Especially for cycling within cities, MTB or something completely different is
likely to have a different risks and helmets may be a clearly good idea there.

~~~
catalogia
I hope that pedantry about cycling safety aside, my point is clear. Feel free
to swap out "cycling without a helmet" for any other risky activity you might
observe day to day if you pay attention to the world around you.

Why do people break the speed limit on wet roads just to get home a minute
sooner, when they could slide off the road into a ditch and never make it home
at all? Obviously, because they think that won't happen.

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rntksi
We run ads for small beauty clinics & spas that cannot afford their own staff
to do that kind of work. This includes facebook ads which have high return
value for the businesses.

I cannot tell you the amount of frustrating time we had to spend to chase
Facebook to stop banning us because of an algorithm that thinks the belly
buttons and the ladies in our ads resemble adult ads (it's not in any way
nsfw, it just shows more skin than usual because that gets interested clicks)

Sometimes I wish there was someone to talk to at facebook to make the
automated process less painful, but we are in an Asian country with no
facebook representative.

------
henvic
Ironically, since I interviewed for a Facebook position a year ago, I can't
post my website link anymore (hosted on GitHub page - programming/photos,
basically) there or on Instagram. It probably happened because I sent my link
to too many friends too fast to ask for opinions, and Facebook marked it as
spam. I tried to ask for help multiple times by using their 'review' feature,
with no answer.

------
seibelj
This is super common, I knew a guy who knew a guy who could get similar stuff
done at another famous social network. A company I know got its short url
because the employee snagged it from some nobody and gave it to the company. I
don’t feel that this is illegal as it is private company that can do what it
want, but a low employee doing this unilaterally is sketchy.

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y-c-o-m-b
I don't use Facebook, but I would think a good transparent way to deal with
this is open a page to the public that lists the ads a company is running
along with statistics like how many times the company has violated policies,
how many ad runs they've accumulated and how many dollars have been spent to
run those ads.

~~~
wayoutthere
So just for scale, a single ad campaign could have _thousands_ of individual
ads. Times a few dozen campaigns at a company. Times millions of buyers, many
of whom buy through an ad agency or network reseller.

The scale of this problem is too big for transparency. Hypertargeting of
advertisements should just be illegal.

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randyrand
If they paid facebook directly would it have still been considered a bribe?

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sp0dr
Knowing Facebook it seems like they would rather corner that market
themselves.

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HugoDaniel
was it zuckerberg ?

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aberforth123
Pff, what can we do to break the ad industry? It sucks on so many levels.

~~~
oconnor663
Think of an ad as something like a 1¢ payment from me to the website. Suppose
there was no such thing as ads, and the website wanted me to make the 1¢
payment directly. What are our options for doing that? Is there any way to do
it without paying fees much larger than 1¢?

If you want ad-supported businesses to go away, invent a convenient way for me
to pay Google 1¢. (Convenient as in, I don't need to create an account with a
password.) It's extremely difficult, both for technical and legal reasons.

~~~
perl4ever
I didn't know anything about the ad industry, but it seems like you may be off
by an order of magnitude. Click through rates average 3+%, and it costs around
$2.70 per click.[1] That seems to mean an impression is worth in the ballpark
of 8-10 cents. Based on my recent web browsing history tonight, I seem to have
visited around one page per minute.

So, the problem is not how to create the infrastructure for micropayments, but
rather that explicit charges would be very high - the effective cost of
browsing the commercial web is about $6/hr, which is about _twice what it cost
in the mid 90s to use AOL_.

I'm not sure of all the implications, but I think this should substantially
change a person's views.

[1][https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-
statistics/](https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/)

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kls
If they where making millions, then this guy sold himself cheap at 5K. He was
literally the decision maker between them and millions of dollars. That is why
they jumped at the retainer price. He could have hit them for 50k and they
would not have blinked.

~~~
inetknght
I don't think you understand how the court system in America works

~~~
kls
I was not commenting on the morality of what the individual did. Rather that
he was shitty at sales. I personally would not have done what he did and find
it reprehensibly, I am fully aware of how the court systems work. The point of
my post is how these people always seem to undersell their illicit services
when said services are a rare commodity and are valuable to the purchaser. My
comment was specifically about the seller of services not knowing how to price
his market. The morality and legality issues have been covered in several
other comments so I figured no need to beat that horse.

