Exclusive | Facebook probed over black-market groups helping illegal migrants land Uber, other jobs

Facebook is facing a probe from Sen.Marsha Blackburn’s office over black-market groups on its website helping illegal migrants unlawfully obtain work.Some of the illicit Facebook groups have been explicit about their intent, with names such as “UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WORLDWIDE” that involve illegal migrants paying to use legal ridesharing drivers’ credentials for jobs that should be off-limits to them because of their unlawful entry into the US.“Turning a blind eye to these groups operating on your platform is just the latest in many instances of Meta choosing profit over the wellbeing of American consumers,” Blackburn (R-Tenn.) recently wrote in a scathing letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.Blackburn is demanding answers from Facebook’s parent company Meta about the policies it has in place to restrict users from fraudulent activity.She is also demanding data on the number of users booted from the platform over such fraud, an accounting of Facebook groups that enable ridesharing fraud, whether Facebook groups can be made “secret” to dodge such scrutiny and internal documents about the issue generally.Blackburn gave the company a deadline of May 6 to comply with her demands.Last year, Blackburn, 72, teamed up with Sen.

Ted Budd (R-NC) and former Sen.Mike Braun (R-Ind.) to scrutinize food-ordering platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub over steps they were taking to ensure illegal migrants aren’t working for them.That inquiry was inspired by a report from The Post about how migrants in New York City were buying access to credentials from legal workers to ridesharing platforms to make money.Those three companies eventually began implementing “more robust driver verification processes.”But recent research has uncovered how illegal migrants are working to bypass some of those safeguards by coordinating with legal workers in black-market Facebook groups.Facebook has tried to thwart some of the groups such as “UBER ACCOUNT FOR RENT WO...