“Internal documents have revealed that Meta has predicted it will make billions from ignoring scam ads that then target its platforms to users most likely to click on them,” writes Ars Technicaquote a long report from Reuters.Reuters reports that Meta “failed for at least three years to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed the billions of users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products…”
According to a December 2024 document, the company shows users of its platforms an estimated 15 billion higher-risk scam ads on average every day – ads that show clear signs of fraud. Meta makes about $7 billion in revenue each year from this category of scam ads, according to another document from late 2024. Much of the fraud came from marketers who behaved suspiciously enough to be spotted by Meta’s internal alert systems.
But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict that the marketers are at least 95% certain they are committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less sure — but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer — Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to deter suspicious advertisers from posting ads. The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad personalization system, which attempts to serve ads based on a user’s interests… The documents indicate that Meta’s own research suggests its products have become a mainstay of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by security staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US.
Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its top competitors were doing a better job of rooting out fraud on their platforms… The documents note that Meta plans to try to reduce the share of Facebook and Instagram revenue from scam ads. In the meantime, Meta has internally acknowledged that regulatory fines for scam ads are certain, and expects fines of up to $1 billion, according to an internal document. But those fines would be far smaller than Meta’s revenue from scam ads, a separate document from November 2024 said. Every six months, Meta makes $3.5 billion from just the portion of scam ads that “carry a higher legal risk,” the document says, such as ads that falsely claim to represent a consumer brand or public figure or show other signs of deception. That figure almost certainly exceeds “the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam advertising….”
A planning document for the first half of 2023 noted that everyone who worked on the team handling advertisers’ concerns about brand rights issues had been made redundant. The company also devoted so many resources to virtual reality and AI that security personnel were ordered to limit the use of Meta’s computing resources. They were only instructed to “keep the lights on….” Meta also ignored the vast majority of user reports of scams, according to a 2023 document. By that year, security officials estimated that Facebook and Instagram users were submitting about 100,000 valid reports of fraudsters sending them messages every week, the document said. But Meta ignored or wrongly rejected 96% of them. Meta’s security staff decided to do better. According to another document from 2023, the company hoped to reject no more than 75% of valid scam reports in the future.
A small advertiser would have to be flagged at least eight times for promoting financial fraud before Meta blocks it, according to a 2024 document. Some larger publishers – known as “High Value Accounts” – could generate more than 500 alerts without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.
Thanks to old Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
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