The social media giant, Facebook has filed a lawsuit against a user for cloaking advertisements for fake COVID-19 news and crypto scams. The complaint was filed on April 9 with a Federal Court in San Francisco.

According to the civil complaint filed, the social media giant alleges that user Bassant Gajjar operated a cloaking service that allowed ads for a number of scam projects to avoid the advertisement reviews for their platform. Gajjar is the operator of LeadCloak, a software provider which specializes in cloaking ads.

Facebook alleges in the complaint that, Gajjar’s cloaking services were used to promote several deceptive pharmaceutical products, as well as crypto investment scams. It further alleges that the cloaking service even allowed misinformation about the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since law in the area of disinformation is in limbo, the social media giant is charging Gajjar with breach of contract on the basis that he signed their user agreement. The plaintiff is seeking for a relief of an unspecified amount of money. It is also asking for a permanent injunction to keep Gaijar and his associates off Facebook.

The complaint further alleges that Gajjar used a minimum of 4 different profiles to operate the platform since 2006. Meanwhile, Gajjar’s Facebook page is currently down, although his LeadCloak’s website remains operational.

For those who are not familiar with the term cloaking, it is a means of identifying readers of a particular website, mainly to spot reviewers from those websites that can ban certain types of advertisements. Operators of those services often do this through the use of IP addresses, geolocation or the URL that they are coming from. From there, it then presents different information, than what a typical user of the platform will see, to the reviewers of the website.

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