SoylentNews

Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report-exposes-how-meta-relied-on-scam-ad-profits-to-fund-ai/ [arstechnica.com]

Internal documents have revealed that Meta has projected it earns billions from ignoring scam ads that its platforms then targeted to users most likely to click on them.

In a lengthy report [reuters.com], Reuters exposed five years of Meta practices and failures that allowed scammers to take advantage of users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
[...]
Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.
[...]
Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.
[...]
“Hey it’s me,” one scam advertisement using Elon Musk’s photo read. “I have a gift for you text me.” Another using Donald Trump’s photo claimed the US president was offering $710 to every American as “tariff relief.” Perhaps most depressingly, a third posed as a real law firm, offering advice on how to avoid falling victim to online scams.

Meta removed these particular ads after Reuters flagged them, but in 2024, Meta earned about $7 billion from “high risk” ads like these alone, Reuters reported.
[...]
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that its collection of documents—which were created between 2021 and 2025 by Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering, and safety divisions—“present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.”
[...]
“We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either,” Stone said.

Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta’s safety team “estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US,” Reuters reported.
[...]
Eventually, Meta “substantially expanded” its teams that track scam ads, Stone told Reuters. But Meta also took steps to ensure they didn’t take too hard a hit while needing vast resources—$72 billion—to invest in AI, Reuters reported.

For example, in February, Meta told “the team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers” that they weren’t “allowed to take actions that could cost Meta more than 0.15 percent of the company’s total revenue,” Reuters reported. That’s any scam account worth about $135 million, Reuters noted. Stone pushed back, saying that the team was never given “a hard limit” on what the manager described as “specific revenue guardrails.”

“Let’s be cautious,” the team’s manager wrote, warning that Meta didn’t want to lose revenue by blocking “benign” ads mistakenly swept up in enforcement.
[...]
Meta appeared to be less likely to ramp up enforcement from police requests. Documents showed that police in Singapore flagged “146 examples of scams targeting that country’s users last fall,” Reuters reported. Only 23 percent violated Meta’s policies, while the rest only “violate the spirit of the policy, but not the letter,” a Meta presentation said.

Scams that Meta failed to flag offered promotions like crypto scams, fake concert tickets, or deals “too good to be true,” like 80 percent off a desirable item from a high-fashion brand. Meta also looked past fake job ads that claimed to be hiring for Big Tech companies.

Rob Leathern previously led Meta’s business integrity unit that worked to prevent scam ads but left in 2020. He told Wired [wired.com] that it’s hard to “know how bad it’s gotten or what the current state is” since Meta and other social media platforms don’t provide outside researchers access to large random samples of ads.
[...]
“These scammers aren’t getting people’s money on day one, typically. So there’s a window to take action,” he said, recommending that platforms donate ill-gotten gains from running scam ads to “fund nonprofits to educate people about how to recognize these kinds of scams or problems.”

“There’s lots that could be done with funds that come from these bad guys,” Leathern said.

Original Submission