Facebook battles fake Libra sellers before launching its controversial cryptocoin

Libra already has the dubious honour of being so dodgy that its dodginess is pretty much the only thing U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can actually agree on. It’s been dubbed a “shitcoin” by a sitting congressman, put on tweet-blast by Donald Trump, and sent some other cryptocurrency prices tumbling.

To top it all off, Facebook’s decentralised blockchain currency project is inspiring some online (ahem) entrepreneurs to try to sell Libra -- even though it won’t be available until 2020.

A Washington Post report found that “roughly a dozen” pages across Facebook and Instagram are pretending to be authorised hubs where users can purchase the currency, using official marketing images and designs, and sometimes even photos of Mark Zuckerberg. Some promise discounted rates available on external third-party sites.

One video viewed by the Post showed Zuckerberg accompanied by a voiceover explaining the currency, and claimed 20 million “coins” had already been distributed to “early investors.”

With onlookers already wondering exactly how Libra will avoid undermining sovereign currencies, now there’s another question: How much responsibility does Facebook have when it comes to policing scams and fraud based on its own currency and hosted on its own platforms?

The company has already had to scrub a number of fake pages, but several were removed only after the Post pointed them out -- highlighting that it’s not as on top of the sheer potential for fakes, frauds, and scams as it should be at this point in the process. It appears that whatever internal screening processes exist for Libra fraud detection are already well behind the scammers.

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“Facebook removes ads and pages that violate our policies when we become aware of them, and we are constantly working to improve detection of scams on our platforms,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Post.

It’s a bit reminiscent of 2015, when fake and knockoff Apple Watches flooded trade shows and the internet before Apple had even officially launched the product.

But Facebook’s association with Libra means that Facebook pages purporting to sell it, especially with the high production values noted by the Post, might kind of look a bit more legit. People who have heard that Facebook’s launching some kind of Bitcoin thing might well know enough to be interested in it, but not enough to know not to click on those third party sites.

Call us cynical, but Facebook’s not famous for its ability to solve problems of its own (inadvertent) making. If Libra's this shady before it even launches, it’s hard not to wonder just how wrong it could still go.