Over the last few days I have been seeing a lot of sponsored posts in my Facebook feed for a new Wise Desktop App offering a $200 bonus to anyone who installs it.
Immediately the alarm bells start ringing. What kind of credit card company is going to payout $200 to each person who installs an app in Windows?
A quick check of the Wise website shows no mention of a desktop app at all. So I do the thing that anyone with a parent who has had their ID stolen does. They reach out to Wise to give them the heads up.
Now here’s the stupid part on Facebook’s side. I actually clicked the link from one of the sponsored posts, links that are featured in the FACEBOOK FEED, I clicked it, opened it, then copied that URL and sent it to Wise.
Immediately upon sending that information to Wise, my account gets hit with a Restriction.
No option to appeal, no way to contact anyone. Nothing at all. Funny how I can not send the URL that I got FROM my Facebook feed to the company that is being scammed but it is perfectly ok for multiple advertising accounts to PAY Facebook to insert it into peoples’ feeds.
Their AI is clever enough to know that that domain name is a phishing site but their advertising system is more than happy to let people PAY to post it on the feed.
The Future
I’ve had issues with Facebook in the past, I hate using it, giving out all this data of mine to such a terrible company and I left it many years ago only to be dragged back in by my need to contact people, people who are only available on Facebook Messenger. But this has been the push for me to finally find a chat platform that is easy to use, available on both Desktop and Mobile, can do text, voice, video, and screensharing, and is not owned by a single company.
I am looking for something like Discord but that I can self-host, is federated, and easy enough for all the folks I know to use. Let’s get the hell away from Facebook/Meta, let’s avoid the closed-source clients like Discord, let’s find something that is free, open, and usable.