Forrest has an assessed net worth of $27.25 billion. He is ranked as the second richest Australian and he and his wife were the first Australian billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to charity in their lifetimes. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017.

The proceedings have been lodged in the Western Australian Magistrates Court, in which Forrest states Facebook failed on repeated occasions to remove posts by scammers using his image to promote fake cryptocurrency investments. Forrest states these have continued to appear on Facebook for almost three years, dating back to March 2019.

Forrest asserts Facebook is "criminally reckless" by its failure to take down false advertisements on its own platform. He further states Facebook is breaching Australian anti-money laundering legislation through its insufficient action in combating scams performed on the site. He states Facebook “failed to create controls or a corporate culture to prevent its systems being used to commit crime.”

Forrest states he approached Facebook over the scams, which includes writing directly to Mark Zuckerberg in November 2019. However, the scam ads using Forrest’s image continue to appear.

Forrest states he is launching the action on behalf of "everyday Australians to protect their savings from being swindled away by scammers.”

"I'm concerned about innocent Australians being scammed through clickbait advertising on social media,” he said.

"I want social media companies to use much more of their vast resources and billions of dollars in annual revenue to protect vulnerable people - the people who are targeted and fall victim to those horrible scams with their hard-earned savings,” Forrest said.

The charges have been brought under Part 10 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, and Forrest states he has the consent of the Commonwealth Attorney-General. The case will be initially heard in the Western Australia Magistrates Court on March 28.

Forrest has also launched civil proceedings in California against the company and states this separate case is pending in the Superior Court of California.

A spokesperson for the social media site, now known as Meta, stated scams "violate our policies and are not good for our community … we’re committed to keeping these people off our platform.”

Online commenters note they have seen these scams, and others with images of Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith - no doubt scammers seeking to leverage Smith’s reputation for their own ends also.