Facebook Found Nigerian Scammer “Doesn't Go Against Community Standards.”

I have compiled a data set of enough scammer's info (names, contact info) that has nearly the word count as the first Harry Potter book. In the early days, I would report these profiles, but the service generally said they weren't going against any policies even when they flagrantly asked for money in their public profiles.

I run a website that attracts a lot of scammers. I have reported their fake profiles to Facebook and got the same response.

I also reported their Gmail addresses to Google and nothing ever happens. If Google did want to review, they'd just need to google the email address I provided to see for themselves.

> 3. Click on "Friends" and look at the Followers, if that Veteran has Friends from Nigeria then you know its a scam

I get how to you this is a scam, but to the 200 million Nigerians it's not. And Facebook is both.

> 2. Right click the profile photo and do a google search on the image this will lead to some results taking you to sites that use the same profile picture

And this can be a good attack vector to DDOS someone, make up sites that are fake to take down their legitimate accounts. Facebook gets attacked multiple ways.

It's hard to know if Facebook here just has too much spam to deal with and it's not worth the time for one report compared with taking down 100 accounts through other means.

The fact Nigeria is one of the poorest countries in the world (http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/NGA) and has this image of being so Cyberpunk is kinda neat to me.

They cause real actual harm, yes, but then so do rich people. And the harm done in Nigeria having 90 million people on less than $1.9 a day is so large it doesn't even make the news.

I had the same experience a few years back. Saw a “promoted” page for a service that claimed to crack Snapchat accounts for a few, with tons of compromised or fake accounts commenting that it works. Not only was their service a scam since it’s impossible, but even if it was true it would still be against the TOS and illegal in most countries.

What do you think was this criminal company’s response? Yep, “not against the community guidelines”.

Facebook enforcement has been sloppy recently. I think AI has actually made things a little worse, lots of false positives and false negatives, and they stubbornly stick to a decision for no apparent reason. It's likely just a bunch of different SOPs for specific reasons which they can't disclose.

Facebook is a cesspool ... the sooner it goes the way of Myspace the better it will be for all of us.