Meta has been exposed for profiting from scam ads flooding its own platforms.
According to internal company documents obtained by Reuters, Meta projected that roughly 10% of its annual revenue would come from ads linked to investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and banned medical products. That’s around $16 BILLION DOLLARS. These scam ads were displayed on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The documents were created between 2021 and 2025, spanning across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering, and safety divisions.
A Tolerance for Fraud
For at least three years, Meta failed to identify and stop these fraudulent ads.
Much of this activity was already flagged by Meta’s internal systems. Yet the company only bans advertisers if its automated models are 95% certain they’re committing fraud. Anything below that threshold gets to keep spending and make Meta money.
That means on any given day, users are seeing an estimated 15 billion “higher-risk” scam ads across Meta’s platforms.
The Business of Looking the Other Way
When Reuters contacted Meta with its findings, company spokesman Andy Stone said the documents “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.”
He claimed the internal estimates were “rough and overly inclusive,” and that the $16 billion projection counted “many legitimate ads.” However, Stone failed to offer a corrected figure.
The internal documents tell a story of a company embracing fraud because they didn’t want to cut into its ad revenue.
The strange part is there are documents where Meta congratulated staff for reducing scams in some markets. In a 2024 internal note, Meta vowed to “reduce ad scams in 2025,” but only after calculating how much these scams were worth to the company.
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Advertising?
The digital advertising industry itself is a breeding ground for fraud. Global ad spending is projected to reach $836 billion by 2026. The sheer scale attracts criminal networks that exploit weaknesses in automated ad systems. These range from click fraud, domain spoofing, fake installs, and false engagement metrics.
The key difference here is most platforms try to nip the problem in the bud. Meta treats it as a part of its business model. The company’s internal systems often let scam ads through until the probability of fraud crosses a near-impossible threshold.
A Look Inside a Broken Company
This investigation reveals what kind of company Meta has chosen to be. This is why Meta is hated by so many people. Why certain things they do is scrutinized by the government. Meta is run by shady, greedy executives who only care about their bottom line. It doesn’t matter if people are harmed by their platforms in some way.
Since regulators move at a snail’s pace, nothing’s likely to change. This will get buried under the rug. Meta will continue to profit from scam ads while claiming they’re actually doing something to combat it.
