Instagram banned the account @NFT, backed by billionaire Mark Cuban, for recurring violations of the terms of use. “This account has been disabled following multiple violations of our regulations and will not be reinstated”, a company spokeswoman told the newspaper Rolling Stone.
The account was reported to promote NFTs without proper sponsored post tagging, which is alarming given that it had 1.7 million followers.
An NFT collector brought the case to the forefront in an extensive Twitter post criticizing the @NFT account, which is backed by billionaire Mark Cuban, who charges $100,000 to promote dubious NFT projects.
On Wednesday (2), a viral thread on Twitter revealed that the popular Instagram account promoted new NFT collections without informing users that it was promotional content.
“This account has been banned after repeated violations of our policies and will not be reinstated”, said Instagram. The company added that according to the terms of use, ads on social media must be reported in “simple and clear language”, such as with #ad or #sponsored tags.
Too late
After the complaint gained repercussion, the co-founder of Leverage Game Media, who controlled the account, promised “immediately cease all ads” e “try to be better” from now on.
But Instagram decided to ban the account anyway.
Despite billionaire Mark Cuban being listed as a co-founder of Leverage Game Media, he told Decrypt that he is just an investor and does not control the company.
“We apologize for any misunderstandings”, said the company that owns the banned account. “We will add additional layers of transparency to what we present to our community going forward”. he added.
After the incident, Cuban was removed from the list of founders on the website Leverage Game Media on Friday (4).
a Mark Cuban owned Instagram account w/ 1.7m followers is promoting a shadowy cabal of scammy copy pasta NFT projects without proper disclosures, thus taking serious advantage of the less informed
a thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/LSuyAmj5MQ
— TSF | Space Cowboy (@topshotfund) February 3, 2022
TopShotFund, a famous NFT collector on Twitter, accused the @NFT account of “promoting dark NFT projects, “taking advantage of the less informed.”
In one of his tweets, he said that in the last couple of weeks, several friends had contacted him asking about new NFT projects that he had surprisingly never heard of.
So he started researching what they all had in common, arriving on the @NFT Instagram account.
2.) meet the @NFT account on Instagram
adept at social media marketing, they’ve amassed 1.7m followers, most of whom this is their first introduction to NFTs pic.twitter.com/ygPyp94UWW
— TSF | Space Cowboy (@topshotfund) February 3, 2022
Upon visiting the account, he noticed that strange NFTs were being promoted to over 1.7 million followers. Thus, projects with clear signs of fraud were identified.
He added that the fraudulent projects had fake followers and paid influencers to promote themselves.
He also shared an image showing the return on investment of 36 projects promoted by the @NFT account. Revealing that those who invested in the projects lost a significant amount of money in scams or devaluation.
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