Meta made over $3 billion from ad fraud on Facebook and Instagram: Report

Of this amount, Meta reportedly earned more than $3 billion from scam ads, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content. Reuters said the internal documents were part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams across Meta’s engineering, finance, lobbying and safety divisions. The report added that the company had been reluctant to implement fixes that could impact its revenues.

While Meta platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are banned in China, the publication said Beijing allows Chinese companies to advertise to foreign consumers. Documents reviewed by Reuters suggest that nearly 25 per cent of all scams and banned-product ads on Meta’s platforms originated from China.

“We need to make a significant investment to reduce growing harm”, Meta staffers told the company’s head of safety operations during a presentation last year. After this, the tech giant created an anti-fraud team to monitor scam ads from China, which led to the company’s revenue from such ads falling from 19 per cent to 9 per cent.

However, a late 2024 document revealed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had asked the anti-fraud team focusing on China to pause its work. Following this, the company reportedly disbanded the team and lifted a ban that prevented Chinese ad agencies from posting on its platforms. A few months after the crackdown, Meta’s ad revenue from fraud ads once again jumped back to 16 per cent of total revenue from its ads business.

What does Meta have to say about its earnings from fraudulent ads?

In a statement to Reuters, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the team formed to combat Chinese ad fraud was a temporary measure. He went on to say that Zuckerberg did not ask the team to be disassembled, but instead asked them to “redouble efforts to reduce them all across the globe, including in China.”

Meta claims that it has removed 46 million ads submitted by Chinese businesses in the past 18 months and stopped working with such ad agencies, but Reuters says the tech giant did not answer any questions it asked about the documents. According to another internal document seen by Reuters, Meta staffers have described China as the company’s top “Scam Exporting Nation” and identified it as the largest source of fraud on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.