indica News Bureau-
Social media giant Facebook has filed a lawsuit against Indian -American software architect for violating the company’s policy against cloaking software.
According to Facebook Basant Gajja provided cloaking software and services designed to circumvent automated advertisement review systems, and ultimately run deceptive and misleading advertisements on both Facebook and Instagram, some of them that also featured photos of celebrities.
“Cloaking is a malicious technique that impairs ad review systems by concealing the nature of the website linked to an ad,” Facebook mentioned in its statement.
Gajjar operated under the name ‘LeadCloak’ and provided ad-cloaking software designed to push fake news and scams related to COVID-19, cryptocurrency, pharmaceuticals, diet pills and fake news pages. Some of the cloaked websites also included images of celebrities, reported Facebook.
In the lawsuit filed by Facebook in the federal court in California, the social media giant claimed that Gajjar’s LeadCloak’s software also targeted a number of other technology companies including Google, Oath, WordPress, Shopify, and others.
“When ads are cloaked, a company’s ad review system may see a website showing an innocuous product such as a sweater, but a user will see a different website, promoting deceptive products and services which, in many cases, are not allowed,” explained Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation at Facebook.
According to Gajjar’s brief profile available on the Internet, he is a digital marketer, SaaS expert and Founder and System Architect at LeadCloak.com. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information Systems, General from California State University-Sacramento and Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, also from California State University-Sacramento, reported The Quint.
In addition to the lawsuit, Facebook said it has taken technical enforcement measures against Leadcloak and accounts. The statement from the company added, “We’ve determined have used their software, including disabling personal and ad accounts on Facebook and Instagram. This suit will also further our efforts to identify Leadcloak’s customers and take additional enforcement actions against them”.
