By CCN.com: Facebook is lying when it claims it has more than 2 billion monthly users around the world. That’s what tech entrepreneur Aaron Greenspan ― a former Harvard classmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ― alleges in a bombshell report.
“Facebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network,” Greenspan posits in a damning 70-page research report entitled Reality Check.
“Its official metrics — many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly — are self-contradictory and even farcical.”
As a result of its artificial inflation of user statistics, Facebook is committing mass fraud by overcharging companies for the ads they place on the social media monopoly’s network, Greenspan claims.
The truth is that at this point, Mark Zuckerberg may in fact be the greatest con man in history, having pulled off a complex fraud at one point valued at approximately ten times the scale of convicted financier Bernard Madoff’s historic and epic Ponzi scheme.
Keep in mind that the larger Facebook’s user base is, the more money it can charge for ads.
Greenspan is the founder of a California-based software company called Think Computer, according to his website. He also runs a legal research website called PlainSite, which produced the report.
‘Billions of Dollars in Ill-Gotten Gains’
Aaron Greenspan says the significance of Facebook’s systemic fraud “cannot be overstated.” According to Statista, The firm’s 2018 ad revenue topped $33.8 billion
Greenspan claims Facebook has been inflating its user account statistics since 2004. Moreover, he says its management is aware of this problem, but hasn’t done much to correct it.
This is how the fake-accounts scheme works, according to PlainSite:
- Companies buy advertising on Facebook based on the assumption that the ads can potentially reach 2 billion real human beings. If these users aren’t real, then “companies are throwing their money down the drain.”
- Fake accounts randomly click on ads or “like” pages to throw off anti-fraud algorithms. This activity defrauds advertisers, but rewards the company with mountains of revenue.
- Fake accounts often defraud other users through scams, fake news, extortion, or other deception.