Anyone who’s been on Facebook recently knows the platform is plagued by advertising and other posts from scammers and other frauds. But the massive scale of the issue is no surprise to parent company Meta, which allegedly estimated that 10 percent of its 2024 revenue—that’s $16 billion USD—came from advertising for known or suspected scammers.
A damning report from Reuters alleges that Meta executives are both aware of the problem and unlikely to take effective steps to stop it. Internal documents seen by the news outlet reportedly show that not only is the company tracking known and suspected scams spreading across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp that shill online casinos, sexual services, or healthcare scams, but the company is also hesitant to crack down on them, which would reduce the revenue earned from criminals who are paying good money to spread their influence across Meta’s social media platforms.
In Meta’s own internal reports, the investigation revealed that the company’s networks were crucial in executing scams, with an estimated one-third of successful online scams targeting the United States being performed with the help of Meta websites and apps. At the same time, the company found that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had become such a lucrative vector for scammers precisely because they’re easier to exploit than competitors’ platforms. “It is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google,” reads one report from April of this year.
Crucially, these scams are being perpetrated by those who use Meta’s paid advertising services, not people merely impersonating regular users or real people. (That’s a separate breed of criminal enterprise.) You might assume that advertisers who operate with official tools, and thus tacitly have the trust of the platform itself, are policed more stringently… but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
A sliding scale of enforcement is (or was) applied to paying advertiser accounts, with a low-level customer needing at least eight user-generated reports before being kicked off the platform. A “high value account” spending huge amounts of money to spread false information and find victims could be reported more than 500 times without any punitive action from Meta. These tactics seem to illustrate the platform operating its advertisers like a gacha game or online casino, incentivizing the biggest spenders to stay active even if they’re known or suspected to be engaging in criminal activity.
Reuters found two illegal online casinos that had been running Facebook ads for more than six months, even though they had been identified by Meta’s internal systems—and even highlighted as the “Scammiest Scammer” in internal communications.
Timothy Hales Bennett
Meta’s automated internal processes do identify and, in some cases, reduce the spread of fraudulent advertisers. But according to the report, there’s only so far that the company is willing to go when money is on the table. An automated advertising auction system—similar to the same back-end advertising that happens billions of times every day all over the internet—can flag suspected scammers trying to purchase ads. But instead of simply shutting down the accounts, or even refusing to accept the advertising bids, the system increases the price for those suspected of fraudulent activity. This, in theory, disincentivizes the criminals from advertising… but also earns Meta even more money if the scammers are willing to pay the premium.
Meta employees tasked with reducing the amount of harmful advertising that shows up on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp appear to be explicitly restricted from vigorous policing. In February, the team that flags and removes suspected scam advertising was barred from taking any actions that might reduce the company’s total revenue by 0.15 percent. Internal documents show that while Meta is concerned that regulators might fine the company for its inadequate protection of its users, these are expected not to exceed $1 billion USD—less than a tenth of the money that Meta is taking in from known or suspected scams.
The Reuters report paints a picture of a company that’s concerned with criminals using its sites to target its users, especially those impersonating celebrities, companies, or government entities… but much more worried about preserving the revenue earned from these scammers.
When pressed for comment, company representatives did not deny that the documents obtained by Reuters were genuine. Meta representative Andy Stone said that the figures Reuters reports were “rough and overly-inclusive,” and that updated reports showed that they mistakenly counted at least some legitimate advertising. Stone did not provide evidence of more recent figures.
Some of the documents show that Meta is attempting to crack down on scams, fraud, and other illegal use of its sites, with a goal of reducing its share of revenue from scams and other harmful ads from 10.1 percent in 2024 down to 7.3 percent in 2025. Stone claimed that in the last 18 months, the company has seen a reduction of user-reported scams by 58 percent, and removed “more than 134 million pieces of scam ad content.”
