Meta reportedly makes 10% of its revenue from fraudulent ads and scams

Date:
Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:40:50 +0000

Description:
Meta apparently makes huge profits from fraudulent ads - so is it in the companys interest to crack down?

FULL STORY

The number of scam adverts and less than legitimate product listings on
social media platforms certainly seems to have dramatically increased in the last few years, but a new report claims the websites themselves could be
partly to blame.

Internal projections seen by Reuters reveal Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, apparently earns a projected 10% of its annual revenue from
the advertising of scams and banned goods - amounting to around $16 billion.

Documents also suggest the social media conglomerate failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads, leaving billions of Instagram, Facebook, and
WhatsApp users at risk from the fraudulent ecosystem.

A so-called crackdown

Over the years, Meta has publicized efforts to undergo major crackdowns on organized crime , pig-butchering scams, and social engineering attacks - even going so far as to remove up to 2 million accounts from the Facebook
platform.

Meta told TechRadar Pro it is 'aggressively fights fraud ' on its platforms, 'because people on our platforms dont want this content, legitimate
advertisers dont want it and we dont want it either'.

"Scammers are persistent criminals whose efforts, often driven by ruthless cross-border criminal networks that operate on a global scale, continue to
grow in sophistication and complexity. As scam activity becomes more
persistent and sophisticated, so do our efforts. Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that distorts Metas approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, not
the full range of actions we have taken to address the problem."

But, these new documents revealed that even marketers that were suspicious enough to be flagged by Metas internal warning systems are often allowed to continue, only getting banned once the prediction for fraud reaches 95%.

That means, if Meta is 94% sure that an advert is scamming its users - its allowed to continue. Shockingly, Meta actually makes more money from adverts
it believes to be scams - charging a higher ad rate as a penalty.

So, is there really much of an incentive for Meta to remove fraudsters
preying on users? Even Meta doesnt think so.

In the documents, Meta reportedly weighs up the revenue it earns from scam adverts, and the regulatory fines that it believes are inevitable if these high-risk scam ads are not mitigated. Note here that Meta is not suggesting
it would voluntarily do more to vet advertisers in order to protect
consumers, but rather that it would act under threat of impending regulatory penalties.

Thousands of scams have been spotted on Meta platforms with varying degrees
of success and severity, but criminals are undoubtedly making a lot of money from these tricks (and so is Meta). In the UK, Meta products were involved in as much as 54% of all payment-related scam losses in 2023, the report reveals
- outlining just how endemic this problem is, making it all the more
abhorrent that Meta chooses to continue profiting from it.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/meta-reportedly-makes-10-percent-of-its -revenue-from-fraudulent-ads-and-scams

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