According to internal Meta documents seen by Reuters, the company predicted that 10% of its revenue in 2024, or about $16 billion, would come from advertising fraudulent schemes and prohibited goods.
According to internal Meta documents seen by Reuters, the company predicted that 10% of its revenue in 2024, or about $16 billion, would come from advertising fraudulent schemes and prohibited goods.
An archive of documents obtained by journalists shows that for at least three years, Mark Zuckerberg’s company could not (and did not try very hard) to stop an avalanche of advertising that exposed billions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users to fraudulent e-commerce schemes, fake investments, illegal online casino sites and the sale of banned medical products.
One document from December 2024 notes that on average, the company shows users of its platforms approximately 15 billion «high-risk» ads every day — that is, those that have clear signs of fraud.
Another document from late 2024 says Meta makes about $7 billion in annual revenue from fraudulent ads. But the documents show that the company only blocks suspicious advertisers if its automated systems predict a 95% probability of fraud.
«If the company is less certain about the fraud, but still considers the advertiser a likely fraudster, Meta charges higher advertising rates as a penalty. The idea is to discourage suspicious advertisers from placing ads,» the article states.
The documents also indicate that users who click on fraudulent ads are likely to see them more often due to Meta’s ad personalization system, which attempts to show ads based on a user’s interests.
At the same time, in his statement on this matter, Meta spokesman Andy Stone noted that over the past 18 months, the company has reduced the number of user reports of fraudulent advertising worldwide by 58%.
«So far in 2025, we have removed over 134 million pieces of fraudulent advertising content,» Stone added.
However, the documents do indicate that Meta’s products have become a mainstay of the global fraud economy. For example, a presentation by the company’s security staff in May 2025 estimated that Meta platforms were involved in a third of all successful frauds in the United States.
Meta has also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its major competitors are doing a better job of detecting fraud on their platforms.
The documents state that Meta plans to try to reduce the share of Facebook and Instagram’s revenue generated from fraudulent advertising, but otherwise the company is reportedly willing to pay a fine of up to $1 billion.
«But these fines will be much smaller than Meta’s revenue from fraudulent advertising, a separate document from November 2024 says. Every six months, Meta earns $3.5 billion just from the portion of fraudulent advertising that «poses a higher legal risk,» the publication notes.
Instead, writes Reuters, of voluntarily agreeing to a more meticulous and thorough screening of advertisers, Meta’s management decided to act «according to the situation» — only in response to future regulatory actions by the state.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that Meta will launch fraud warnings in WhatsApp and Messenger and strengthen filters for suspicious accounts.
It is also interesting that Meta was recently accused of uploading 2,400 pornographic films to train AI. The company denies this.
