INFO Tech&Co – Facebook has been displaying unsavory publications related to energy renovation for years. Some pages have paid hundreds of thousands of euros to the American giant.
Since at least 2019, several pages dedicated to energy renovation offers have posted hundreds of ads to French users of the social network. With the key websites highly criticized on online forums, often without the slightest legal mention, in a sector where cases of scams are particularly numerous.
In four years, two pages have stood out: “Energy Transition Plan” and “Energy Transition Program”. They alone paid about 1.4 million euros to Facebook for advertising. According to the numbers disseminated by the platformseveral pages of the same nature have paid a total of more than 2 million euros to Facebook, according to the count of Tech&Co.
“Fraud and deception”
Asked on February 21 about the two pages mentioned above, Facebook announced to Tech&Co that it had deleted these two pages on February 24 for “fraud and deception”, after several years of existence.
Among the hundreds of advertisements broadcast, these two Facebook pages redirected Internet users to several sites, including plan-transition-energie.fr, transitionenergie.com, iso-exterieure.com and eco-mag.info. Domain names purchased anonymously, which, for some, display the logo of the Ministry of Ecological Transition, each time promising thermal insulation operations supported by the State.
For Internet users, it is often difficult to know who is behind these websites. Very often, no legal notice appears. When the latter are displayed, they remain very incomplete: no name of an existing company or legal representative is registered.
“In France, the law requires legal persons to specify their name, their registered office, their telephone number,” recalls Emma Leoty, lawyer specializing in consumer law, with Tech&Co.
Widely distributed advertisements
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 Energy Transition Program page, for example, spent between 15,000 and 20,000 euros for a single advertisement, featuring Barbara Pompili (Minister for Ecological Transition until May 2022), or Emmanuel Macron , promising each time insulation at the expense of the taxpayer. According to data from Facebook, more than one million users were exposed to this ad.
Again, the advertisement links to a web page hosted on the eco-mag.info site, devoid of any legal notice and displaying fake reviews from the Trustpilot site. His real page, accessible hereaccumulates only three comments, each time evoking a deception.
With Tech & Co, neither of the two managers of these pages – joined for one by telephone and for the other by SMS – wished to answer.
Since January 2022, a public platform, called France Rénov’, aims to help individuals 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 numerous energy renovation scams.
