Turned off by online energy scammers

A consumer in the Philippines fumes as she rips open a portable charger to discover she has been conned. The batteries are choked with sand, making her yet another victim of scammers on Facebook.

There's a slew of energy-related scams proliferating on Facebook - from fake solar panel incentives in the United States to hoax electric bike giveaways in Indonesia and the sale of dud devices in the Philippines.

And the trend underscores how fraudsters worldwide profit off disinformation, casting a wide net across social media users. And many take the bait amid a cost of living crisis and high utility and energy costs.

"What they did was awful," 24-year-old Filipina Brenilyn Ayachock rages in an online video that shows sand pouring out of the power bank as she opens it with a knife. "We were expecting a good product, but this is what they sent us."

Ayachock made the purchase on what appeared to be the Facebook page of a legitimate energy device retailer, with "special offers" and "flash sales" alongside environment-friendly messages such as "turn off unnecessary lights."

The page stopped responding to her, Ayachock says, after she bought the device for 1,500 pesos (HK$215). She immediately reported the page to Facebook, but it was still active this week.

Ayachock is far from the only victim as social media becomes a breeding ground for everything from bogus cryptocurrency ads to "romance" scams and hoaxes aimed at extracting people's personal data.

Last year, the Philippines government warned against "unscrupulous" money-saving offers as consumers grappled with backbreaking utility prices and inflation, with the tricksters also doctoring news reports to promote a bogus "power saving" device to slash electricity bills.

Warnings fell on deaf ears, with commercial data showing thousands of such gadgets are sold monthly. Activists say complaints in online reviews are drowned out by comments from people desperate to try anything to lower their expenses.

"Scammers follow the headlines and there isn't a day that goes by that we don't hear about how to conserve energy, rising gas and utility prices and the need for renewable energy," says Amy Nofziger, director of fraud victim support at the US-based nonprofit AARP. "It's a wide net for scammers. Most social media sites do not thoroughly vet ads placed on their sites, but many users do not know this and put their full trust in these advertisements."

The ease with which fraudsters pelt users with disinformation raises questions about the capacity of platforms like Facebook to police paid-for scam advertising that is a lucrative revenue source.

Critics, including Patricia Schouker, a fellow at the Colorado-based Payne Institute, say algorithms that prioritize content based on preferences have let scam ads prey on users most likely to engage.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's owner, says it views the "threat of scams seriously" and has taken action including disabling many of the ad accounts responsible for fraud. "But the people who push these kinds of ads are persistent, well-funded and constantly evolving."

In October AFP debunked Facebook posts claiming free electric bikes were on offer in Indonesia after the government raised fuel prices. Meta said it had disabled pages and profiles linked to the scam.

But Hendro Sutono, a member of the citizen's group Indonesia Electric Motorcycle Community, voiced concern that fake stores offering electric bikes have cropped up on the platform - and are hard to detect.

"The schemers take pictures from real stores and repost them on their cloned accounts so they look really legitimate," says Sutono, who fears fraud could tarnish the image of electric vehicles to the extent people will give up using them.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE