Facebook Hustles: The Belgian spin-off

Drawing on roughly 80 hours of open-source investigation conducted by Check First, this EU DisinfoLab and EDMO Belux report documents a scam advertising network on Facebook that impersonated six major Belgian news outlets - including Le Soir, RTBF, De Standaard, La Libre, 7sur7, De Morgen, and HLN - to lure users into fraudulent investment schemes. The operation, active since at least 2018, ran more than 1,500 ads directing traffic to over 160 fake domains, using hijacked content-creator pages with a combined reach exceeding 10 million users.

The fabricated content featured invented interviews and scandals involving figures such as Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and Elio Di Rupo, alongside international celebrities like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, translated into French and Dutch to target French-speaking Belgians over 30, a demographic presumed to have investment capacity.

The report concludes that Meta failed to prevent the scheme's recurrence despite prior exposure, and that fragmented Belgian rules on impersonation and fraud left enforcement gaps that the Digital Services Act's transparency and risk-assessment provisions could address, though implementation remains incomplete.