According to the original report by the BBC, sellers on Facebook Marketplace have been offering uncertified rainforest land for sale, boasting of parcels of land as big as 1,000 football pitches.
The BBC reported that it was easy to find parcels of land for sale by using the search facility inside Facebook Marketplace.
Facebook was contacted by the BBC and said:
Our commerce policies require buyers and sellers to comply with laws and regulations,
Bartalks used Google Translate to translate the word ‘forest’ into Portuguese, which is ‘floresta’, and again with the word for timber ‘madeira’ and found some dubious results. For example, this one-bedroom house is described as ‘ready to move in’. Yet most of the photos are of the trees and surrounding land.
It was being offered for BRL R$60,000 (USD$10,772).
Sometimes the land was offered with satellite images and GPS coordinates, enabling the journalists to determine the land sold was illegal.
Indeed, posing as wealthy investors they met one seller, Fabricio Guimarães – a middle-class office worker from the City who took them to see some land he was selling. He had burned the land to the ground already and boasted that there was no chance for any state inspectors to be any trouble.
Brazil’s polarising president, Jair Bolsonaro has stated that he sees undeveloped land as an impediment to progress in the country.
