Facebook filed a lawsuit yesterday against Chinese company ILikeAd Media International Company and the two men who control it, Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao. The company was founded in 2016 in Hong Kong and is being accused of using the Facebook ad platform to run a malware scheme. Once the malware was installed successfully, it would compromise victims’ accounts and post new ads on behalf of the victim.
ILikeAd used the techniques of celebrity baiting and cloaking to entice Facebook users to click on the ads. Cloaking is when the ad’s real destination URL to Facebook scanners, but redirects users to another web page holding malicious content. Facebook’s legal team stated that the cloaking method makes it difficult to uncover the party responsible, and therefore no legal action had been taken until this point.
Read More: Facebook sues Chinese malware operator for abusing its ad platform
