It is an epidemic that costs tens of billions of euros every year worldwide. The victims ? Companies that generally have a storefront. Many of them are listed on the stock exchange. This disease very recently affected Adidas, the German sports equipment manufacturer. On January 16, a press release, perfectly consistent with all those published very regularly by the company, is sent to the international press. We learn that the group’s board of directors has just approved the revolutionary plan presented by the new boss of the three-stripe brand, Bjorn Gulden. A historic shift that puts sustainable development and employee well-being at the heart of the strategy. It is “the most ambitious social and environmental plan ever carried out by a major brand”, can we read in the press release. After all, the company is losing momentum, Bjorn Gulden has just been appointed and he wants to make an impression. Adidas is therefore preparing to sign the Pay Your Workers agreement, an international campaign defended by numerous NGOs and which promotes better remuneration for employees of the behemoths of the textile industry. But there is better: Vay Ya Nak Phoan, a former Cambodian textile worker and trade unionist, is named No. 2 in the company, alongside Gulden… The bigger it is, the better it goes. Of course, everything is wrong. The phony press release was sent from a fake Adidas e-mail address and its authors went so far as to copy the group’s official website identically, to drown the fish a little more.
In the seconds following its publication, the fake news is picked up by several international media, news websites and a few influencers. A few minutes later, Adidas published a denial, but the news went viral and went around the world. Behind this campaign, two activists, the Yes Men, known for their hard-hitting actions and their taste for provocation and hoaxing. For years, they have been defending the excesses of liberalism and free trade and have in the past attacked McDonald’s, the American chemical industry giant Dow Chemical or the oil services company Halliburton.
If the misadventure of Adidas could make you smile, other fake news are otherwise more harmful. On December 30, on Russian social networks, images spread showing a Red Army soldier holding a wide open box filled with Bonduelle brand cans. The package comes with a greeting card with this message: “Dear soldier, happy new year! We wish you the best and a quick victory!” The next day, Bonduelle, which still has an activity in Russia, denies having delivered canned food to the Russian army. But the damage is done… and the small seed of doubt is planted in the meanders of the Net.
Long limited to the political field, to people, or to science, the surge of fake news hits all major companies today. “For three years, the drift has been significant and we have reached a record level in recent months, it’s unheard of,” notes Raphaël Labbé, co-founder of Wiztrust. The company publishes software which, thanks to the blockchain, makes it possible to certify and authenticate press releases, often financial. Because the damage can be considerable. In a study carried out in the United States in 2019, researchers from the University of Baltimore estimated the cost of economic misinformation in the world at $78 billion in total, taking into account both the effects on the reputation of companies and the consequences on their sales, the losses of market capitalization or the expenses incurred to fight against an attack. An addition that must have since disappeared. Especially since techniques and tools have improved considerably. “Thanks to artificial intelligence, bots, automatic content generation robots, the technological barriers to entry are extremely low,” continues Raphaël Labbé. Worse, public relations companies specializing in misinformation have multiplied: “Dark PR” use “troll factories” to invent new narratives disclosed by fake experts, fake Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts…
Difficult to trace the thread of attacks to find the real sponsors. The simplest is when a false rumor is fed by activists who seek to hack a company’s communication to make a splash and promote a cause. Example with The Fixers. This group of activists has for years denounced the more or less credible “greening” operations of large companies. They are the ones who, in Portugal, published a false press release from the oil group Gaz Petrol announcing the abandonment of all its gas exploration projects in northern Mozambique. This false information was taken up by TVI24, one of the three continuous news channels in the country. They are still the ones who concocted a press release announcing that Vanguard, one of the largest investment funds on the planet, was modifying its asset purchase strategy to be in line with the Paris climate agreement.
But attacks can also come from companies that are determined to tarnish the image of one of their competitors. Recently, an alarm manufacturer and installer was the victim of false information circulating on social networks indicating that its systems could simply be deactivated with simple jammers. “The company took a long time to react and its sales plummeted. Worse, the word “jammer” appeared under Google as soon as you typed the name of the company”, says Florian Silnicki, a specialist in crisis communication and founder of LaFrenchCom.
And then there are the crooks, the smart little financial robbers. A practice that has become more and more popular in recent months. There, it is a question of manipulating the stock market price of a company and of benefiting from it by playing on the rise or the fall on the value of the action. Last spring, the American start-up Lithium Corporation saw its price soar by 250% in the space of half an hour after a false press release announced its acquisition by Tesla. Elon Musk, the boss of the American manufacturer, had tweeted about the need to secure its supplies of lithium, a rare metal necessary for the manufacture of electric batteries, but no contact had ever been woven between him and the nugget. There fake news was relayed on Twitter by Sawyer Merritt, one of Tesla’s best connoisseurs, and the number of transactions in the stock increased 100 times during the day. It was enough for the “robbers” to have bought packets of shares over time before the attack and that they sold them at the highest level to make a nice tumble.
In 2021, a false press release from Walmart indicates that the American distribution giant accepts payments in Litecoin: the courses of this cryptocurrency immediately soared. In the mass of transactions, very difficult to identify counterfeiters. Conscious of these risks, the gendarmes of the Stock Exchange scrutinize suspicious movements with a magnifying glass. “Our analysis also covers social networks, which are subject to systematic monitoring and alerts,” replied the Autorité des marchés financiers when asked about the subject.
“Companies and their communication departments are still very naive and not very experienced in the face of this type of attack. When they have identified the author of false information, some are even ready to pay him to do so. disappear”, underlines Florian Silnicki. The deletion of a fake news would also have a market price: 1,500 euros. “Paying is always a very bad idea because the entrepreneur then enters an infernal circle of blackmail,” he continues. At the risk of appearing, if the case is made public, for the one who really had something to hide…
