Beware of scammers posing as therapists to sell drugs online!
Thanks for tuning in. The following investigation was sparked by astonishing number of scam comments I have had to delete on previous newsletters related to psychedelics. The results of my deep dive were quite worrying:
Recently, we have witnessed the spark of the psychedelic renaissance. Researchers, regulatory forces, and societal attitudes are shifting in favour of psychedelics' potential to treat mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction.
However, a number of people online are taking advantage of this public acceptance to advertise and sell illicit drug right before our eyes, on social media. Most worrisome of all is the deliberate targeting of vulnerable individuals with mental illnesses as the victims of these scams. At first glance, these ‘advertisements’ seem innocent enough, but they actually contain links that lead to black market scams and drug trades.
Dozens of deceitful comments like these bombard Facebook posts that are intended to inform the public about psychedelic science. The scammers will tag anyone who comments on a larger post and leave a link to another Instagram profile that shamelessly advertises illicit drugs. By exploring these links I managed to uncover the gravity of the situation.
One case of these fraudulent links contained a secondary link in their description, from which you can buy cloned credit cards from the dealer! What is utterly shocking is that this fraudulent account claims to be “a society of therapists and healthcare professionals.”
Fraud. Deception. This is happening on Facebook and Instagram!
So, I’m left wondering: how can Facebook allows such unregulated illegal activity on its site?
These accounts are probably made to trick people into sending money (with no intention of delivering real drugs or cloned cards). However, it’s seriously despicable that they are designed to target people who are suffering from mental illness by offering them practically any drug as magical remedy for all their problems.
It’s possible that the Facebook comments are generated by bots that spam millions of comments on posts that include #psychedelics, and then divert traffic to Telegram, where drug deals can be done anonymously.
However, is Facebook doing enough to address and stop this problem?
Facebook claims to invest $5 billion per year on online safety and security, and that they stop 90-99% of all community guidelines violations. With billions of users and an immense amount of content generated, it becomes daunting to manually review and moderate each piece of content effectively.
How is Facebook aware of how many violations are undetected? Do they even know that these comments should be considered reportable violations?
Do you think it’s Facebook’s job to prevent spam comments such as these from ruining the user’s experience?
