Thread by @CraigSilverman

George Michailow needed face masks for seniors at his church. He saw a Facebook ad and bought 10. An hour later he saw *another* FB ad and bought 3.

These ads are supposed to be banned from FB. And the masks never arrvied.

Exposing a global mask ads op: buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

Here’s a shot from one mask ad run by ZestAds, the co. behind the scheme. They were rife with false claims, and said the masks were made a by a Japanese professor. He does not exist. I found close to 100 pages linked to the company. It spent $20 million on Facebook ads in 2019.

The Dontgoout page ran ads and also listed a real US company as its “Confirmed Page Owner.” This new transparency feature was launched by FB to show the entity behind a page. ZestAds completely subverted it. Ppl may have thought they were buying from a US co., not one in Malaysia

I spoke to multiple US companies whose names were listed on pages controlled by ZestAds. None had any idea how it happened. FB declined to say how ZestAds did it. FB investigated after I reached out. It banned ZestAds and sent a cease and desist letter.

I also sent Shopify a list of close to 100 onlines stores I connected to ZestAds. It told me it was removing them due to policy violations.

Meanwhile, there are more than 600 online complaints about ZestAds that say the company never delivers products, signs people up for autobilling without permission, or sends junk that's different from what was advertised. Here’s the statement the company sent me.

Facebook can ban mask ads, but it can't actually stop them. And it earns money on each ad, as users get ripped off.

Between ZestAds and a company I exposed last year that’s +$70 million in revenue for FB from bad ads. There’s *lots* more co’s like these: buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…