Aaron Greenspan – a former Harvard classmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a bold claim in his bombshell report that the social media hosts 1 billion fake accounts on its platform, or 50 percent of its total users worldwide.

In his 70-page report, Greenspan makes the case that Facebook’s much-vaunted account base, which supposedly has over 2 billion monthly active users, is packed with fake accounts communicating with just enough randomness to trick the social network’s algorithms.

“Its official metrics — many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly — are self-contradictory and even farcical”, claims Greenspan.

‘Billions of Dollars in Ill-Gotten Gains’

Facebook plays an inherent role in the global advertising industry. According to the Financial Times, together with Google and a few other giants like Amazon, the firm is said to control 80 percent of all digital advertising in 2019.

Greenspan claims that this over-reporting of user statistics has misled Facebook’s advertiser network, essentially making the company “liable to its advertising customers for billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains — over and above what advertisers have already sued over.”

According to Statista, the firm’s 2018 advertising revenue topped $33.8 billion, almost doubled from 2015, which was $17.08 billion. However, according to Plainsite – a legal research website run by Greenspan, only a fraction of this number was generated from real user activities. In reality, a sizeable amount of traffic online is generated by ‘fake-clicking’ done by bots and humans working on specially-organized ‘click farms’ as the company reached the market saturation.

Controversies over Privacy Lapses 

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been under fire. In the past years, the social network had been entrenched in high-profile controversies over users’ data protection and privacy issues.

In an allegation made in March 2018, Facebook was accused to have improperly allowed UK data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of as many as 87 million users without their consent.

In response to the mounting criticism, the firm has put forward security measurements to step up commitments to privacy protection and striving to curb the illicit behavior of users. But the firm may be deliberately understating the number of fake accounts. While presenting his findings of the incidence, Greenspan isn’t surprised by the alleged fraud Zuckerberg is committing, as he quotes:

“Mark Zuckerberg has clarified over time that growth at any cost is his only priority,” Greenspan wrote. “Fake accounts have been keeping the company [afloat for years].”

“Mark Zuckerberg may in fact be the greatest con man in history, having pulled off a complex fraud at one point valued at approximately ten times the scale of convicted financier Bernard Madoff’s historic and epic Ponzi scheme”, he continued.