Since at least 2019, several pages dedicated to energy renewal offers have published hundreds of ads for French users of the social network. With key websites heavily criticized in online forums, often without the slightest legal mention, in a sector where scam cases are particularly numerous.
In four years, two pages have stood out: “Energy Transition Plan” and “Energy Transition Program”. They alone paid around 1.4 million euros to Facebook for advertising. According to figures released by the platform, several pages of the same nature have paid a total of more than 2 million euros to Facebook, according to the Tech&Co count.
“Fraud and Deceit”
When asked on February 21 about the two pages mentioned above, Facebook announced to Tech&Co that it had removed these two pages on February 24 for “fraud and deceit,” after several years of existence.
Among the hundreds of ads broadcast, these two Facebook pages redirect Internet users to various sites, including plan-transition-energie.fr, Transitionenergie.com, iso-exterieure.com and eco-mag.info. Domain names bought anonymously, which, for some, display the logo of the Ministry of Ecological Transition, each time promising state-supported thermal insulation operations.
For Internet users, it is often difficult to know who is behind these websites. Very often, no legal notice appears. When the latter are shown, they are very incomplete: no name of an existing company or legal representative is recorded.
Widely distributed ads
In order to reach as many people as possible, the creators of these two pages are investing heavily. Between November 2022 and February 2023, the page of the Energy Transition Program, for example, spent between 15,000 and 20,000 euros on a single ad, starring Barbara Pompili (Minister for the Ecological Transition until May 2022), or Emmanuel Macron , each time promising isolation at the expense of the taxpayer. According to Facebook data, more than a million users were exposed to this ad.
Once again, the ad links to a web page hosted by the eco-mag.info site, without any legal notice and displaying fake reviews from the Trustpilot site. His actual page, accessible here, has just three comments, each conjuring up a hoax.
With Tech & Co, neither of the two people responsible for these pages -one joined by phone and the other by SMS- wanted to answer.
Since January 2022, a public platform, called France Rénov’, aims to help people renovate their homes and benefit from better energy insulation. On the home page, the site displays a message intended to warn Internet users against the many energy renewal scams.
Source: BFM TV
