“I am Baek Jong-won. I am an investor worth tens of billions of won, and I have learned a lot by reading professional books. I will give you 5,000 physical books for free.”
This is the content of a post in the name of Baek Jong-won, CEO of The Born Korea, posted on Meta’s Instagram. When you click ‘Learn More’, you will be asked to agree to the personal information processing guidelines. Feeling strange, I went back and read the post, and I saw an awkward Korean phrase that said, ‘Through this book, investing in the future market will provide different benefits than ordinary people.’ Trust in the post decreased. If you look closely, you won’t see a verification badge indicating that you are a public figure that appears on the left side of your account profile.
I edited the feed again, and this time there was a photo of John Lee, former CEO of Meritz Asset Management. They recently established a stock education group and are maintaining a 30% profit, and they announced that they would share investment know-how for free. Each time the feed was refreshed, the owner of the account changed to former People Power Party Emergency Response Committee Chairman Kim Jong-in, Cambridge University professor Jang Ha-jun, and celebrity Hong Jin-kyung. The content remained the same. It is an ‘impersonation account’.
“I almost got really fooled”… Kim Jong-in’s ‘surprise’ with guaranteed profit feed
As the impersonation account rapidly spread, one of the victims, former CEO Joo Jin-hyung, even personally reported it. On the 13th, former CEO Joo said, “Advertisements claiming to provide stock investment advice by impersonating my name are illegal,” and added, “I asked them to report it each time, and even though many people reported it, it has not gone away even after about 10 days. “I reported the account posting these ads as a fake account, and Facebook responded that it does not violate their community rules,” he said.
As the number of damage cases increased, the Korea Communications Commission announced in an explanatory material that day that it was cooperating with the Korea Communications Standards Commission and others to review and request correction. The Korea Communications Commission said, “We will make efforts to prevent secondary damage through measures such as review, blocking, and deletion.” The National Defense Commission also announced on the 19th that it would take strict action. The Personal Information Protection Committee is also discussing internal response measures.
Were you conscious of “43 trillion won in advertising sales”? The reason for Meta’s passive response is
It is estimated that the reason information technology ( IT ) platform operators such as Meta respond lukewarmly to theft damage is because more than 98% of their main profits come from ‘advertising’. Meta recorded sales of $32 billion (approximately 43.3 trillion won) in the second quarter. Advertising business sales amounted to $31.5 billion (approximately 42.6 trillion won), or 98.43% of the total. The structure is such that as the number of exposures increases, the advertising price increases. Therefore, it is interpreted that it is difficult to take strict and strict action against celebrity impersonation and stolen accounts.
Even institutionally, it is difficult to fully crack down on cases of impersonation and theft that are spreading on online platforms. This is because in order to punish impersonators and thieves, it is necessary to collect evidence directly to prove the damage and file a civil lawsuit. You can file a lawsuit for ‘infringement of portrait rights’ on the grounds that you have stolen a photo, but this also안전놀이터 has the difficulty of having to directly prove the damage caused by infringement of portrait rights. In the past, the so-called ‘Act on Preventing Impersonation of Others (Amendment to the Information and Communications Network Act)’ was proposed, but was scrapped before passing the National Assembly threshold.
According to the industry on the 21st, since last month, impersonation accounts like this have been popping up on social network services ( SNS ) operated by Meta, such as Instagram and Facebook . It is a fake/impersonation advertising account that steals the face and name of a famous person widely known in Korea. Although impersonation accounts existed in the past, it is unusual for impersonation accounts with similar content to spread on such a large scale.
Most impersonation accounts use neat images similar to those used in the media and post with plausible phrases, so there is a high risk of being deceived. Most of them post pictures of famous people and contain content that would be attractive to the average person, such as “I made a significant profit,” “I have never experienced a loss,” and “I guarantee a guaranteed success rate.”
A financial industry worker said, “If you don’t look carefully, you might not know it’s a fake advertisement.” One Instagram user also said, “I thought it was real, so I read it line by line and went in to check the account, and then it said to join a group. Only then did I realize it was an impersonation account,” and “Afterwards, a similar advertisement for joining an investment group appeared. When I opened it, “It’s uncomfortable and boring to watch every time,” he said.
The problem is that with artificial intelligence ( AI ) technology, cases of impersonation and theft are increasing. Recently, as AI voice and video manipulation has become possible, the methods are becoming more sophisticated, so institutional supplementation is urgently needed. According to the National Police Agency, the number of account theft cases in 2020 was 1,067, a 42% increase compared to the previous year (751 cases). The National Defense Commission calculated that the number of cases of infringement on portrait rights increased from 45 in 2019 to 114 last year, and to 90 cases as of last September this year. Considering the damage that is not revealed above the surface, the actual scale of damage is expected to be greater than this.
Meta’s position is that they are responding separately. A Meta official explained, “We are taking the recent impersonation and theft cases seriously internally,” and added, “We are monitoring by deploying additional manpower and technology to crack down on accounts.”