A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers

Asher Burke died in March after a helicopter he'd chartered to visit the Kenyan ranch he'd invested in as an "entrepreneur playground" crashed in high winds; his stateside obits called the 27-year-old deputy political director of the Republican Party of San Diego as an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ads, Inc, "on a mission to disrupt the lifestyle industry with our advanced approach to product creation and marketing."

But Ads, Inc was a huge con, a sophisticated and elaborate Facebook hustle that combined ever trick in the Republican-affiliated grift playbook: it was a pyramid scheme recruiting stay-at-home moms, a quack remedy company that used celebrity endorsements to market to low-information boomers with pages that were dolled up to look like Fox News, an offshored con that used low-waged workers in the Philippines to manage the dull, repetitive aspects of the con.

Here's how it worked: Ads, Inc, pitched itself to stay-at-home Facebook moms as a multi-level marketing scheme and payed them to recruit their friends to "rent their Facebook accounts." Recruits were sent a Raspberry Pi-based gadget to plug into their routers that would impersonate them on Facebook and plant millions of deceptive ads.

The ads would feature a photo of a celebrity along with a false claim of some scandal they were embroiled in (internally, the company called these "jail bait" since ads that falsely claimed that beloved celebs were in jail generated tons of clicks).

People who clicked the links were automatically vetted through Facebook's own query system to weed out Facebook employees who were checking on these ads -- the Facebook version of Uber's illegal greyball system that wouldn't accept bookings from transit regulators checking up on the service. Read the rest