Polish billionaire seeks support for ‘deepfake’ scams lawsuit against Meta

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One of Poland’s wealthiest entrepreneurs wants influential figures from his country to take legal action against Facebook parent Meta, over the alleged spread of “deepfake” scams on the social media company’s platforms.

Rafał Brzoska, the founder and chief executive of parcel locker company InPost, told the Financial Times he had identified about 150 prominent people in Poland targeted by artificial intelligence generated impersonations to join a lawsuit against the $1.45bn tech group.

Brzoska said the action would be a “follow-up” to the recent injunction secured through Polish data protection authorities designed to stop faked news and images that feature his likeness and that of his wife Omenaa Mensah, a television presenter, from appearing on Meta’s platforms. Last month a Warsaw court issued a preliminary ruling upholding Brzoska’s injunction claims.

“I have nothing against Meta as a company but I’m saying a big no way to making money hand-in-hand with criminals by advertising their crimes among the users of a Meta platform,” said the Polish billionaire. “If they [Meta] want, they could diminish it to zero, but they are making so much money on deepfakes.”

Meta has come under growing pressure to tackle a rising tide of sophisticated and convincing deepfakes on its platforms, including by blocking ads featuring AI-created images, video and audio of real people created without their consent.

In June a US judge authorised Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest to sue Meta over Facebook deepfake ads in which he was shown promoting crypto investments. Others, such as Martin Lewis, founder of UK-based MoneySavingExpert.com, have long complained of fake ads using their name and image without permission.

Meta’s policies ban running ads that use public figures in a deceptive way to try to scam people out of money. In October, the platform announced it was testing the use of facial recognition technology to detect and block what it dubs “celeb-bait ads” on its platforms, whether AI is wielded or not.

Brzoska founded his company in 2006 and has since turned InPost into Europe’s largest operator of automated parcel lockers. InPost has a market valuation of €8.3bn, following a 2021 listing in Amsterdam that was backed by Advent International, the US private equity firm.

Brzoska said his list of 150 possible co-plaintiffs included some former Polish presidents and prime ministers, but he did not disclose specific names of people he would approach.

He said the goal was to force Meta to stop the spread of deepfake scams but not to seek financial compensation for past privacy violations. 

“I want to encourage all these 150 people affected in Poland to join my lawsuit,” Brzoska said, seeking a precedent that would give “other victims in other countries the same path, specifically in the European Union. I think it’s doable: it will be very hard for victims in the US, I guess, but the European Union is my big hope because of its regulations.”

The EU has spearheaded online privacy rights through legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark law that allows Europe’s regulators to impose tough fines on companies that fail to protect the data of citizens.

Meta said in a statement: “Scams are a complex threat that target, deceive and manipulate people across industries and scammers use every platform available to them and constantly adapt to evade enforcement.”

The company added: “We don’t want ads that seek to scam or mislead people on our apps — they violate our policies and damage our platforms. That is why we, alongside our industry peers, continue to take steps to improve detection and enforcement.”