MEDIA ACCOUNTABILITY | DISINFORMATION Facebook’s Dirty Little Secret: How “Viet Spam” Is Picking Your Pocket and Playing You for a Fool
A coordinated scam operation is flooding Facebook with fake celebrity news. Facebook knows. Facebook profits. And you’re the product.
By Ben Jay
It showed up in my Facebook feed twice in the same week. Two different posts. Two different celebrities. Same breathless headline, same fabricated dollar figure, same nonexistent lawsuit, same fake TV special. The only thing that changed was the famous face attached to the lie.
The version I saw most recently targeted legendary skier Lindsey Vonn. The post claimed she had personally invested $369,000 in a television special titled “Where Truth Leads, Justice Follows” — a program allegedly exposing hidden documents, targeting 13 powerful figures, and naming Attorney General Pam Bondi first in a major lawsuit. It promised 2.7 million viewers had already watched. It urged you to click a link to learn more.
None of it is true. Not one word.
The Template Behind the Lie
Fact-checkers at Snopes and Lead Stories have now documented this scheme extensively. It works like a franchise. The same fabricated story — the same $369,000 investment, the same 2.7 million viewers, the same Pam Bondi lawsuit angle — has been recycled with Mark Ruffalo’s name. With Adam Sandler’s name. With Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, and Will.i.am. With Barbra Streisand. Even, absurdly, with Pope Leo XIV.
The TV special doesn’t exist. Lead Stories searched Google for the title. Snopes searched Google for the title. Neither found anything — not a streaming link, not a review, not a network credit, not a production company. Real TV specials, even obscure ones, leave a digital trail. This one left nothing, because there is nothing to find.
What the links DO lead to are ad-stuffed blogs with no real news content. That’s the whole point. Your click is the product. Your outrage is the engine. Your trust is the currency being spent.
The Operation Has a Name: “Viet Spam”
Lead Stories has identified the source of this campaign as a coordinated operation based in Vietnam. The administrators behind the Facebook pages running these posts have Vietnamese names. Their profiles are written in Vietnamese. And the pattern — rotating celebrity names, identical copy, clickbait links to made-for-advertising pages — matches what Lead Stories calls “Viet Spam,” a well-documented scheme they have debunked dozens of times.
This is not a rogue teenager in a basement. This is an organized, profitable content factory producing AI-generated disinformation at scale, designed specifically to exploit the trust of Facebook users — and the permissiveness of Facebook’s platform.
Facebook Knows. Facebook Profits. Facebook Does Nothing.
Here is the part that should make you angry.
Facebook has the technology to detect repetitive, templated, coordinated inauthentic behavior. They use it when it’s politically convenient. They have entire trust and safety teams — or had them, before recent rounds of layoffs gutted those departments. They have AI content moderation systems. They have years of documented experience with exactly this kind of Vietnamese spam network.
And yet these posts circulate freely. They generate engagement. Engagement drives ad revenue. And some of those ads? They run right alongside the fake posts, or on the clickbait blogs the posts drive traffic to. Facebook earns on the front end — from the ad dollars that help these scam pages stay visible — and the scammers earn on the back end from the ad revenue your click generates.
Facebook users get the clickbait. Facebook gets the cash.
Why This Works — And Why It’s Dangerous
These posts are engineered to bypass your skepticism. They use the language of journalism — “Breaking News,” “legendary athlete,” “previously unseen documents.” They attach real names: Pam Bondi is a real person, a real Attorney General. Virginia Giuffre is a real Epstein survivor. Jeffrey Epstein is a real story people rightly care about. The scammers drape fabrication over legitimate public outrage to make the lie feel credible.
And they target Facebook specifically because Facebook’s older user demographic — the people most likely to trust what they read, most likely to share without verifying — is exactly the audience these operations want to reach. That’s not an accident. It’s a feature of the targeting model.
Beyond the revenue scam, there is a deeper harm. Every share of a fake story corrodes the information ecosystem a little further. It makes real investigative journalism harder to believe. It trains people to distrust everything — or worse, to trust the wrong things. Disinformation doesn’t just mislead individuals. It degrades the shared reality that democracy depends on.
How to Spot It Before You Share It
The Viet Spam playbook is consistent. Watch for these red flags:
► A celebrity name + a specific dollar investment + a TV special you’ve never heard of.
► The phrase “previously unseen personal documents” or “striking new allegations.”
► A lawsuit “targeting 13 influential figures” with Pam Bondi “first.”
► Millions of viewers in under 48 hours — with no network, no streaming platform listed.
► A link to a domain you’ve never seen before (berrycalm.info, ifeg.info, etc.).
► A Facebook page with no “Transparency” tab showing its country of origin.
Simple rule: if you can’t find the TV special on Google in 30 seconds, the TV special doesn’t exist.
The Accountability Question Facebook Won’t Answer
Facebook’s terms of service prohibit coordinated inauthentic behavior. They prohibit spam. They prohibit misleading content designed to drive off-platform traffic through deception. On paper, every one of these Viet Spam posts is a terms violation.
In practice, these posts circulate for days or weeks before any action is taken — if any action is taken at all. The business model of a platform built on engagement doesn’t reward slowing down content, even content that is demonstrably false. It rewards clicks. It rewards shares. It rewards the emotional spike that a shocking headline produces before anyone stops to ask whether it’s true.
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced Facebook was stepping back from fact-checking partnerships. He framed it as a free speech issue. What it actually means, in practice, is less friction for operations exactly like this one.
If you are a Facebook user — and 3 billion people are — you are navigating an information environment that the platform has chosen not to protect you in. That is a policy decision. It has a price. And you’re paying it.
The question isn’t whether Facebook can stop this. They can. The question is whether they will. And that answer — based on every year of evidence — is: not until someone makes them.
Ben Jay is an independent journalist and Substack writer covering national security, media accountability, and political corruption. He publishes at benjay75.substack.com.
Sources: Snopes.com, Lead Stories (Yahoo News), Meaww.com fact-check — all published March 24–25, 2026.