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I've spent the last month buried in internal Meta documents, Senate investigations, and lawsuit filings.
What I found keeps me up at night.
Meta projected that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue came from ads for scams, illegal goods, and prohibited content. Not a rounding error. Not an oversight. $16 billion in fraudulent advertising revenue.
And here's the part that made my jaw drop: Meta users are exposed to an estimated 15 billion "higher-risk" scam advertisements daily.
Fifteen. Billion. Every single day.
While Meta announced licensing deals with USA Today, CNN, Fox News, and Le Monde in December 2025, positioning Meta AI to compete with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, something darker was unfolding.
The company rolled out an AI-powered support hub. Success rates for recovering hacked accounts jumped 30% in the US and Canada. Impressive, right?
But here's what the press release didn't mention.
An entire Reddit forum was created in 2025 to help people suing Meta over disabled accounts. The company even had to admit its "support hasn't always met expectations."
The timing? It raises questions I can't ignore.
Between April and July 2025, the Tech Transparency Project identified 63 scam advertisers who ran more than 150,000 political ads on Meta platforms.
Total spend? $49 million.
These weren't your typical bad ads. They featured deepfake videos of President Trump, Elon Musk, and prominent Democrats promoting fictitious government stimulus checks and Medicare benefits.
The primary target? Seniors.
Get this: one scam advertiser outspent UBS, Uber, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.
Meta disabled some accounts only after they'd spent over $1 million. I've reviewed the timeline page by page. The delay wasn't accidental oversight.
Then in June 2025, Meta filed a lawsuit against Joy Timeline HK Limited, maker of CrushAI. Why? The app ran more than 87,000 ads promoting "nudifying" apps capable of creating non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes. The company created at least 170 business accounts to game Meta's detection systems.
CBS News found dozens of such ads still running on Instagram and Facebook despite Meta's removal efforts.
Even as Meta claims to review ads before they run.
This is where the internal documents get chilling.
Meta requires 95% certainty before banning advertisers for fraud.
Read that again. Ninety-five percent. That's not a typo. Meta set the bar at near-absolute proof before taking action.
But it gets worse.
Meta placed strict revenue guardrails capping enforcement actions at 0.15% of projected revenue. In the first half of 2025, that meant limiting fraud enforcement to $135 million out of $90 billion in revenue.
The documents show executives adopted a "moderate" enforcement strategy focused on countries with the greatest near-term legal exposure. They even plotted a gradual reduction in scam-derived revenue from 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3% in 2025.
The goal wasn't eliminating fraud. It was managing the decline to avoid disrupting business projections.
Here's the kicker: Meta budgeted for potential regulatory fines of up to $1 billion. Executives noted this was "a mere fraction" of the $7 billion in annual revenue from high-risk ads alone.
Do the math yourself.
The fines are cheaper than the cleanup.
In November 2025, Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal did something rare.
They agreed.
Both called for FTC and SEC investigations into Meta, citing internal documents showing the company was involved in "one-third of all successful scams in the US."
Let that sink in. One-third.
Using FTC estimates of $158.3 billion in overall fraud per year, this suggests Meta was responsible for more than $50 billion in consumer loss in 2024.
The senators alleged Meta knowingly profits from:
Illicit gambling ads
Payment scams
Crypto scams
AI deepfake sex services
Fake federal benefits offers
When both sides of the aisle agree on something this serious, the evidence is usually overwhelming.
Here's where it gets more disturbing.
Meta doesn't just allow suspected fraudsters to advertise.
The company charges them higher rates through "penalty bids" rather than removing their ads.
Stop and think about that business model for a second.
Meta identified the fraud. Confirmed the suspicion. And chose to monetize it at premium rates instead of stopping it.
This isn't passive negligence.
This is active profit optimization.
Let's make this personal.
If you're running legitimate ads on Meta platforms: You're competing against scammers with deeper pockets and fewer restrictions. They can afford to outbid you because fraud pays better than honest business.
If you're a user: You're navigating a platform where one in ten ads you see might be fraudulent, and the company has calculated that's an acceptable ratio. Your exposure to scams isn't a bug. It's a feature of the revenue model.
If you're an investor: You're holding stock in a company that may face regulatory action that actually impacts operations, not just creates headline risk. Those internal documents are now public record.
The AI expansion Meta is promoting? The news licensing deals, the support hub improvements, the competitive positioning against ChatGPT? It's all happening alongside a systematic decision to monetize fraud at scale.
I keep returning to the same questions.
How does a company project 10% fraud revenue without systemic knowledge?
How does it set enforcement caps at 0.15% of revenue without executive approval?
How does it budget for regulatory fines while maintaining the exact behavior that triggers them?
The documents suggest these weren't accidents or oversights.
They were strategies.
Meta's AI capabilities are advancing rapidly. The technology for content delivery, user support, and advertising optimization is genuinely impressive. But here's the paradox: the same AI systems that power legitimate innovation are being weaponized for fraud at unprecedented scale.
The platform can detect fraud well enough to charge penalty bids. It just chooses not to stop it.
The FTC and SEC investigations are ongoing.
The bipartisan Senate pressure is mounting.
The internal documents are now public record.
Meta faces a choice: reform the revenue model or defend it in court.
I've watched this pattern before with other tech platforms. The companies that survive these moments? They're the ones that change before they're forced to change.
The ones that don't become cautionary tales in business school case studies.
Right now, Meta is betting that $16 billion in fraud revenue is worth the regulatory risk. The company is calculating that $1 billion in potential fines is cheaper than the cleanup.
I'm watching to see if that calculation holds.
Because the documents I've reviewed suggest Meta knows exactly what it's doing.
The question isn't whether the company understands the scope of fraud on its platforms.
The question is whether it cares enough to fix it.
I’ve spent the last month buried in internal Meta documents, Senate investigations, and lawsuit filings.
What I found keeps me up at night.
Meta projected that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue came from ads for scams, illegal goods, and prohibited content. Not a rounding error. Not an oversight. $16 billion in fraudulent advertising revenue.
And here's the part that made my jaw drop: Meta users are exposed to an estimated 15 billion “higher-risk” scam advertisements every single day.
Fifteen. Billion. Every single day.
Because internal guardrails prioritized revenue stability over aggressive enforcement, leaving scam networks active for extended periods.
Deepfake political and financial scams exploded in 2025, using AI-generated impersonations to deceive seniors and vulnerable populations.
Internal documents show enforcement thresholds required 95% certainty and strict revenue caps prevented meaningful crackdowns.
Yes — FTC and SEC investigations are underway, and bipartisan Senate pressure makes significant action likely.
Reports suggest Meta platforms were involved in $50+ billion in U.S. consumer losses.
Primary Keywords
Meta fraud revenue
Meta scam ads
Meta deepfake scams
Meta FTC investigation
Meta SEC investigation
Secondary Keywords
Social media advertising fraud
AI-generated scam ads
Deepfake political ads
Penalty bids Meta
Online platform regulation
High-risk ads: Ads linked to scams, illegal goods, or policy violations.
Penalty bids: Higher-cost ad auctions imposed on suspected fraudsters.
Deepfake scams: AI-generated impersonations used for deception.
Revenue guardrails: Internal limits that cap enforcement actions.
Meta has the AI capacity to detect fraud.
The question is whether it has the willingness to stop monetizing it.
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