In a blog posted on June 29, Facebook said it had filed two lawsuits against those who violated the Advertising Policies. The defendant in the first lawsuit is a California-based marketing company and agents. The second lawsuit is against a group of people living in Vietnam, who hijacked accounts to run illegal ads.

According to Facebook Director of Law Enforcement and Litigation Jessica Romero, four individuals living in Vietnam – NHT, LK, NQB and PHD – used “cookie stealing” or “session stealing” techniques to compromise personal accounts of employees of many advertising and marketing agencies, and then they ran unauthorized ads from these accounts. The Facebook blog claimed that victims were scammed, leading to account loss after installing an app from the Google Play Store called "Ad Manager for Facebook". The app has been removed by Google.

When the “Ad Manager for Facebook” is downloaded, the victim shares their Facebook login information and others. The hackers use the information to access the account and then run ads. In some cases, they used the accounts to commit online scams.

According to Romero, this group ran illegal ads worth more than $36 million. Facebook refunded victims and helped them secure their accounts. Facebook said it was trying to expose the entire behavior of the four violators, forcing them to take responsibility for writing the "Ad Manager for Facebook" application to trick users.

According to Facebook, this is the company's second lawsuit against account hijacking. The first lawsuit occurred in December 2019, in which the defendant tricked people into installing malicious code on the Internet. The malicious code allowed the defendant to compromise the victim's Facebook account and run unauthorized ads to promote items such as fake and imitated goods and weight loss pills.

Du Lam

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