Australian prosecutors have dropped mining billionaire Andrew Forrest’s criminal case against Meta in which he was seeking reparations over a series of crypto scam advertisements that used his face.

According to a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP), there was insufficient evidence to continue Forrest’s prosecution against the tech giant.

The CDPP, representing Forrest’s case, reportedly made a submission to the chief judge to discontinue the case after receiving the brief. 

In response to the case’s termination, Forrest said it was “a tragedy for innocent parents and grandparents who have lost their life savings.”

Read more: Google must tell Irish politician names behind crypto scam ads

Forrest sued Meta in Australian courts in 2022, accusing the social media firm of failing to take down thousands of crypto scam ads using his face and breaching anti-money laundering laws. 

A Meta spokesperson said the company “doesn’t want scams on its platforms and we will continue to work tirelessly to prevent them and protect our users.” They added that scams are a complex threat and that bad actors will use every platform available.

Forrest has said he will continue to sue Meta in California over the same matter involving crypto scam adverts.

Fellow tech giant Google sued two alleged perpetrators of crypto scams earlier this month. Google accused the two China-based app developers of defrauding over 100,000 people via 87 fraudulent apps on its Google Play Store.

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Facebook parent company Meta pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges as the social giant fights allegations that it recklessly facilitated clickbait crypto scam advertisements impersonating mining billionaire Andrew Forrest.

As reported by The Guardian, Meta’s plea was heard in Armadale Magistrates Court after it was charged with three counts of recklessly handling proceeds worth $1,000 or more that arose from the crypto scam ads. 

Forrest launched the lawsuit against Meta in February last year, claiming that the company had failed to act on the ads after repeated requests to take them down. He also accused Meta of breaching anti-money laundering laws. 

During the proceedings, Forrest and Meta’s lawyers have been in dispute over the exposure of a series of documents, which Forrest will now have to hand over. However, Meta has been barred from using the received documents in similar cases. 

Social media giants in court over crypto scam ads

Meta recently settled a lawsuit with Qatari billionaire Wissam al Mana, admitting to the publication of “false, misleading, and defamatory” crypto ads on Facebook in 2019 that used the billionaire’s likeness. 

Read more: Google must tell Irish politician names behind crypto scam ads

A civil lawsuit involving crypto scam ads published by Google and top Irish politician, Tánaiste Mícheál Martin, has also been underway in Ireland. The ads again used the likeness of someone prominent to trick viewers into a crypto scam. This case has led to Google essentially giving up the details of the crypto ad scammers if Martin requests it. 

In addition, Forrest also sued Facebook in California in 2021. His current case in Australia will return to court on February 9. 

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Prominent Qatari businessman and Janet Jackson’s ex-husband, Wissam al Mana, received a public apology from tech giant Meta as part of a settlement over crypto scam ads that used his likeness.

On Friday, a court in Dublin heard Meta’s lawyers admit to “false, misleading and defamatory” ads that were published on Facebook in 2019, “by malicious third parties” without al Mana’s knowledge or consent.

Details of the settlement, agreed upon by both parties after a three-year battle, remain sealed. However, Meta has agreed to take “robust measures” against crypto scam ads in the future.

As noted by the FT, it’s rare to see such a lengthy and expensive court battle waged against the tech giant. Al Mana is a prominent businessman in Qatar, helping to run his family’s Al-Mana Group — which distributes for well-known car and luxury brands like Hermès.

The 48-year-old was previously married to popstar Janet Jackson. The pair have a son together — an event which granted Jackson an extra $100 million when she filed for divorce shortly after giving birth.

Al Mana said that the case was rigorously pursued because, while Meta took down the ads, there was nothing stopping the culprits from starting new ones. The billionaire’s legal team said that more fake ads appeared in 2019, two years after al Mana first filed complaints. The ads caused reputational harm, distress, and embarrassment, he claimed.

Meta and Google settle near-identical cases of crypto scam ads

“Meta accepts and regrets that the publication of these fake advertisements by malicious third parties has caused Mr Al Mana reputational harm, distress and embarrassment,” Meta said in a statement.

“Meta apologises sincerely and unreservedly to Mr Al Mana for this.”

On Thursday, al Mana’s lawyers sought an order that would require Meta to share identifying information about the buyers of these crypto scam ads. Their IP addresses, names, place of residence, and more would be handed over.

Read more: Billionaire’s lawyers oppose Meta’s request for crypto scam documents

Tech giant Google was forced to hand over similar information to top Irish politician Michael Martin on Thursday. He too sued over crypto scam ads that used his image without permission.

According to Martin, “every citizen should be entitled to request and receive information relating to bad actors behind these schemes.”

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Lawyers in the ongoing court battle between mining billionaire Andrew Forrest and Facebook’s parent company Meta say that Meta’s request for further case documents is “oppressive,” “an abuse of process,” and “goes against client privileges.”  

The iron ore tycoon is suing Meta over a series of scam cryptocurrency advertisements bearing his likeness that appeared on the site in 2019. Forrest launched legal action in February last year and also claimed that Meta breached anti-money laundering laws.

As reported by WAtoday, Forrest’s lawyer disputed the summons at Perth Magistrates Court on Monday, saying, “The documents sought lack a legitimate forensic purpose and have no relevance to the case.”

She added, “Given how long this has been going on, the length of time this has been ongoing, your honor ought not to make further orders for disclosure.”

Meta wants personal emails

Documents requested by Meta include personal emails with Forrest’s lawyers and expert witnesses, reports detailing the use of Forrest’s name in third-party advertisements, and conversations discussing his overseas litigation funding.

Paul Yovich, representing Meta, said that parties were submitting more evidence despite initially claiming no more relevant documents were needed. He said, “When the prosecutor says there are no further documents to disclose I cannot have complete confidence that is completely accurate.”

Young requested the cancelation of Meta’s July summons and asked that Meta’s request for documents used in similar court proceedings in the US and Ireland also be canceled.

Virgin Media owner Richard Branson is also said to be sending lawyers to social media companies facilitating crypto scams using his name. He also previously spoke with Meta’s chief operating officer about the promotions. 

Crypto scams like these impact those unfortunate enough to believe in the advertised false claims. One woman lost £40,000 ($50,800) in a bitcoin investment scam that used the likeness of a famous financial guru in the UK. Another victim landed herself in £150,000 ($190,000) of debt after falling for a similar crypto scam using the same guru.  

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YouTuber Jarvis Johnson encountered less than 1,000 English-speaking users in Mark Zuckerberg’s $36 billion metaverse. The vast majority were under the age of 18. Children rampantly circumvent Zuckerberg’s poorly-enforced age limits and overwhelm gameplay.

Jarvis spent a full week living in Meta’s Horizon Worlds, the most popular metaverse. ‘Most popular’ in this case is certainly less than superlative, with Meta estimating fewer than 200,000 monthly users. Unfortunately, Jarvis’ investigation found that Horizon Worlds has closer to 900 daily users.

Other metaverses are even more sparsely populated. Plots of virtual land in NFT-based worlds have declined 98% or worse, and alternate metaverses barely exist beyond a marketing buzzword.

For adults wanting to interact with others in their age bracket and escape the hundreds of children running rampant throughout Horizon Worlds, enterprising players have engineered elaborate tests of adulthood to grant entry to members-only spaces. One adults-only lounge requires extending one’s avatar arm longer than a child would be able to fluidly extend Meta’s gyroscopic controller.

• In October 2022, Horizon Worlds claimed to have 200,000 monthly users, which was already discounted from its earlier claim of 300,000 monthly users. 
• Zuck had set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users by the end of 2022. That obviously never happened.
• As of today, daily active users (DAUs) might have fallen below 1,000.

Horizon Worlds made Jarvis Johnson nauseous

Protos has previously covered the cratering of ‘metaverse’ properties in general, including significant drops in DAUs and the value of their native tokens.

According to Jarvis, using Google to query ‘Horizon Worlds’ returns embarrassing results like “Is Horizon Worlds still available?” and “What do you do in Horizon Worlds?”

While exploring Horizon Worlds, Johnson found most spaces devoid of humans. He described mini-games in the metaverse as “janky” and moving around felt stiff when he used default settings. The vast majority of games involved bouncing balls, all of which grew tired after a couple days of gameplay.

Even after tweaking settings endlessly, he admitted that Meta’s virtual reality (VR) headset made him feel nauseated. The YouTuber ingested copious amounts of anti-seasickness medication to make it through his full week commitment.

In summary, Johnson gave Horizon Worlds a week of his life and reported his comical findings. That amount of time is certainly longer than most of Meta’s users after a confusing signup process, rampant age limit circumvention, seasickness, and lackluster gameplay.

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Aptos is the latest VC-backed Proof of Stake blockchain primed to replace Solana as the newest, slickest, highest-tech L1.

Last night’s launch of its native token APT went as expected, dumping almost 50% from its listing price in a matter of hours. Pre-earned insider rewards and a (very) last-minute airdrop announcement contributed to the chaos.

A spin-off from Meta’s seemingly stalled foray into cryptocurrency, Aptos boasts its very own programming language. According to Aptos’ official Twitter, Move has been “specially developed” for the chain, despite the project’s own whitepaper stating that “Move originated with the predecessor” (Meta’s Diem blockchain). The chain also boasts a novel transaction ordering system, known as Block STM.

As well as technical innovation, marketing has centered around other trusty retail-bait claims of security and high scalability, with the potential for over 100k transactions per second (TPS).

However, since Monday’s announcement of its mainnet going live, on-chain data has shown just 4 TPS, lower than that of the Bitcoin network.

Following the activation of the new chain, worries about the tokenomics of the accompanying APT token began to circulate on Twitter. Centralized exchanges (CEXs), such as key backer FTX, had announced the listing but details on the initial supply hadn’t been published by Aptos leading up to the launch.

Facing increased pressure, an official — though last minute — Tokenomics Overview was published less than 24 hours before CEX listings.

The brief summary explains that, of the one billion initial token supply, 51% will go to the “Community” and the remaining 49% to Core Contributors, Investors, and the Foundation. 

However, of these “Community” funds, “A majority of these tokens (410,217,359.767) are held by the Aptos Foundation, and a smaller portion (100,000,000) are held by Aptos Labs.”

While the statement also stresses that insider tokens will be locked up for at least 12 months and released gradually thereafter, it also gives away that locked tokens can be staked, and that staking rewards will not be locked.

The enormous quantity (490 million) of locked tokens, coupled with the fact that the “maximum reward rate starts at 7%,” means that a total of almost 100,000 tokens per day may be accessible to insiders, team members, and VCs to dump on retail investors buying on CEXs.

The article also contains the statement that “Mainnet was launched on October 12, 2022,” rather than yesterday as announced, meaning insiders have already been earning staking rewards for five days, ready to dump APT the moment listings went live.

Read more: What we know so far about Solana’s latest $8 million hack

Dumping staking rewards is an established and lucrative workaround for insiders or those with deep enough pockets.

When much-hyped Stargate Finance launched its STG token in March, Sam Trabucco, formerly of FTX-linked Alameda Research, admitted, “We did indeed buy all the tokens,” before committing to holding the tokens “for at least three years.”

The promise clearly didn’t extend to staking rewards, however. Over the last six months, Alameda has cashed out millions of dollars worth of STG to Binance or FTX as the token price has slowly bled out, currently down 90% since its early April peak.

It appears that Aptos is working from the same playbook as Solana, boasting the same backers and an almost identical value proposition. With this in mind, and given the traction Solana has in terms of technology innovation, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these chains are created purely to milk retail investors.

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After years of attempting to launch a stablecoin for Meta (formerly Facebook), David Marcus has adopted Bitcoin and its Lightning Network. The tech giant’s former lead on its failed Diem (formerly Libra) project has launched a new company, LightSpark, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Paradigm, Coatue, and Matrix Partners.

LightSpark will develop backend infrastructure for businesses interested in using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which facilitates low fees through payment channels for small transactions like buying coffee. Developers created Lightning to take some of the data processing load off the Bitcoin blockchain, which has very limited storage space.

Despite some initial controversy and growing pains in early versions of Lightning, it rapidly gained traction as a way to issue small payments without ludicrous fees.

Lightspark’s closest competitors include Blockstream — Bitcoin’s largest infrastructure company. It operates Core Lightning, the biggest implementation of Lightning. Another rival, Strike, already operates a Lightning payments app in 200 countries. Cloud Lightning node provider Voltage is also a competitor, making it easier for Lightning users to spin up a hosted node.

Read more: Meta whistleblower warns Zuck’s metaverse could harm mental health

LightSpark adopts Bitcoin after stablecoin failures

LightSpark’s founder, PayPal mafia member David Marcus, previously led Meta’s efforts to create a stablecoin.

It first aimed to create several coins for distinct regions of the world but soon abandoned the plan. Instead, it decided to focus on just one: Libra.

Meta’s Libra Association attracted big names when it unveiled in June 2019. Its members included MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, Visa, eBay, Lyft, Uber, Spotify, and Andreessen Horowitz. However, the project soon encountered Congressional pushback. Regulators were concerned about a large corporation wielding such influence over a global economic project.

Legislators demanded hours of testimony from Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and asked him to delay his stablecoin.

• High-profile members quickly abandoned the Libra Association.
• Meta also planned to release a crypto wallet called Calibra in 2020. It later renamed Calibra to Novi but it never launched.
• At the end of 2020, Meta attempted to scrub Libra’s tarnished name by rebranding to Diem.

Yet Diem continued to face regulatory issues. German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz called the project “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“It is clear to me that Germany and Europe cannot and will not accept its entry into the market while the regulatory risks are not adequately addressed,” he said. He also expressed strong opposition to a currency issued by private parties, saying that “we must do everything possible to make sure the currency monopoly remains in the hands of states,” (our emphasis).

After investing untold sums into Diem ⏤ Meta has a total research and development budget of $27 billion annually ⏤ the tech giant eventually gave up, selling Diem’s assets to Silvergate for a paltry $182 million.

Meta is currently testing a new feature that showcases NFTs in its sister social network, Instagram.

Edit 13:31 UTC, May 17: Clarified in headline and throughout copy Meta’s connection to David Marcus and LightSpark.

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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says her former employer (now going by the name Meta) hasn’t learned from its previous mistakes as it continues to develop its metaverse. 

In an interview with Politico Haugen said: “[Meta has] made very grandiose promises about how there’s safety-by-design in the metaverse.”

“But if they don’t commit to transparency and access and other accountability measures, I can imagine just seeing a repeat of all the harms you currently see on Facebook,” (via Politico, our emphasis).

Last year Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents claiming (among other things) that:

• Facebook was aware of its platforms’ negative effect on the mental health of teenage users,
• its products incited ethnic violence,
• and it was failing miserably to battle misinformation.

For the record, the Menlo Park-headquarted firm claims it’s working hard to address these concerns. It says it is spending $50 million on input from external groups to consider privacy, security, and responsible design.

However, to put this figure into perspective, Meta spent $10 billion on development last year alone.

Metaverse v.1 is a bit shit 

In their current state, the many different metaverses (metaversi?) are very early in their functionality.

Protos discovered that there was actually very little to do on a visit to a largely deserted play-to-earn Decentraland.

There is a belief, at least at Meta HQ, that the virtual world will become as ubiquitous as social media. Zuckerberg has big plans to improve on Meta’s current offering of Occulus goggles and legless avatars.

However, Meta’s virtual world will require the collection of huge amounts of sensitive data and full-body tracking.

Read more: OPINION: The Metaverse and ‘Web 3’ aren’t even here and they’re already cringe

“I’m super concerned about how many sensors are involved,” Haugen told Politico.

“When we do the metaverse, we have to put lots more microphones from Facebook; lots more other kinds of sensors into our homes.”

Politico notes an Electronic Frontier Foundation report which warns that the metaverse “poses substantial risks to human rights.”

In September’s “Building the Metaverse Responsibly” blog post, Meta execs Andrew Bosworth and Nick Clegg claim human and civil rights are at the top of the firm’s agenda.

Facebook whistleblower lost a friend to harmful online content

Haugen became instantly famous after she leaked tens of thousands of Facebook internal documents which left the social media behemoth red-faced.

She told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that she decided to expose her former employer because she had lost a friend to conspiracy theories fuelled by online misinformation.

It’s worth noting that chief exec Mark Zuckerberg responded to the WSJ’s Facebook Files investigation, alleging in a Facebook post that many of the claims don’t make sense.

Read more: Citi says metaverse could be worth up to $13T, predicts 5B users

“If we didn’t care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space — even ones larger than us?” he wrote.

Facebook hired Haugen in 2019 as part of its Civic Integrity team.

The department was tasked with guarding the platform against misinformation, particularly concerning elections around the world.

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Out now: the first four episodes of our ongoing investigative podcast series Innovated: Blockchain City.

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Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen is tipped to follow PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in leaving Meta’s board of directors after investing billions in rival web3 projects.

Business Insider relayed sentiment of sources close to the company who say Andreessen’s tenure could be under threat due to the work of his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Andreessen is currently the longest-serving Meta (formerly Facebook) board member, having been appointed in 2008.

Over the past year, a16z has plowed a fortune into virtually every kind of web3 project, including Bored Apes’ Yuga Labs, Sam Altman’s dystopian Worldcoin, and “climate neutral” blockchain project NEAR Protocol.

A16z finished raising $2.2 billion for its third crypto fund last July and plans to amass $4.5 billion for its next vehicle expected to debut in the next few months. If it succeeds, it would be the biggest crypto venture fund to date.

Meta has plans for its own web3 projects and Andreessen’s continued investment in potential competitors is supposedly not a good look.

The Zuckerberg-led tech giant announced last month that Thiel would give up his place on the company’s board later this year to “devote his time to other interests.”

As Business Insider noted, Thiel’s time at Meta was marked by a number of controversies, including his vocal support for former US President Donald Trump.

He also raised eyebrows with his suggestion that Meta should carry on with its policy of not fact-checking ads from politicians in 2019.

Meta’s nine-member board is up for re-election in May.

Meta braindrains to a16z startups

Conflicts of interest between companies and their board members’ other projects aren’t uncommon. But according to cited sources, Andreessen’s other investments are becoming thorns in Meta’s side.

Last October, two of Facebook’s top tech brains jumped ship to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto team.

In December, the company led a $36 million funding round in support of Mysten Labs, a blockchain infrastructure startup founded by four former Facebook engineers.

Andreessen Horowitz insiders have even thrown shade at Meta for its metaverse and web3 ambitions. Speaking this week after a16z led a $450-million funding round in Yuga Labs, a16z’s crypto head Chris Dixon told The Verge:

“To me, Yuga Labs, combined with these other emerging web3 companies, are an important counterweight to companies like Meta.”

Read more: [Web3 crypto startups poach top execs from Facebook, YouTube, Amazon]

“There’s a dystopian future where Meta is this kind of dominant digital experience provider, and all of the money and control goes to that company,” added Dixon.

For the record, a16z says there’s nothing in the rumors of Andreessen leaving Meta, telling Business Insider: “If he were to step down, he doesn’t know about it. So no, it’s not happening. At least not now.”

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Out now: the first four episodes of our ongoing investigative podcast series Innovated: Blockchain City.

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