The key sentences:
> the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators.
The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it.
It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.
At least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(
This is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there.
Anybody remember this? https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out...
Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery.
And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came.
Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.
I deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.
Original Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
"...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them – ... was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms"
There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.
I've gave up reporting scams on FB, they don't care. It always an automated response "we've reviewed the content and it doesn't break our community guidelines" or similar.
These are for obvious scams, account in different country to items they are trying to purchase/sell, haven't been used in a long time and suddenly active. When selling vehicles the account tries to make you go to malicious websites to pay for vehicle checks falsely insisting the seller is legally required to do so.
When 10% of their revenue is from scams, without government policy there's no incentive for FB to fix. Scams feels like a feature they silently tolerate while doing the bare minimum by providing a button and automated responses to look like they are trying to prevent it.
Certainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective.
No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it
That probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just skirts the border of being scams or fraud.
Once I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around what internal controls exist when something like that makes it out to users.
I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform
Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager.
After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account.
How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing.
I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
I actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing the fake Bambu labs ads. There’s no FBI to enforce online fraud so why would they care?
I tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though.
Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing folks along.
It's wild.
As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?
Veritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good.
Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the "legitimate" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms.
This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL.
I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue.
But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue.
It's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing.
The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation".
(facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok): https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills
I got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy.
It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.
If you include speculation and gambling I'd bet 10% of all economic activity is heavily dependent on either outright scams or scam-adjacent behavior.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Sad, because I know first hand of legitimate businesses who struggle to run Instagram ads due to unexplained blocks or payment gateway issues
As my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket.
I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world.
A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
That's a quarter to a third of its entire margin. And that's what it admits to.
Snakeoil on every corner these days - from online scams to text message scams to the whole supplements industry to prosperity gospel to ... it sure feels like we're surrounded by hustlers and charlatans.
X's scam originated revenue is probably a bigger percent, but 10% is too much... Shame on Meta.
edit: wow, some people REALLY don't like getting told they are knowingly contributing negatively to society.
I wonder what their definition of scammy is? I bet it’s pretty narrow.
In my country there are obvious clones of known portals with clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda, sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed. So its done on purpose
Google should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at least 10% from scams, if not more.
Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display ads multiple times a day.
I've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm", but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them are seeing the exact same ads.
I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes against our community standards".
These ads usually link to a website where you can download an application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course, they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to be some cleverness going on.
https://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage
I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.
Google and Meta are kinda like cattle ranches --- they're not being run to benefit the cattle.
Users of these platforms are being farmed like cattle.
NextDNS or a similar solution is absolutely essential these days. You can't always configure every device your loved ones use. And Chrome on mobile will always be a problem. NextDNS solves this for me to a large extent.
So, they donate to victims?
10% seems a bit high, while claiming they made efforts -- I only heard arguments for 2-3% that are hardly avoidable; Or are these numbers wishful thinking?
If 10% of my income came from scams, I’d be thrown in prison…
To me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising revenue is from scams. I’d bet Google has a much higher number than 10%, since they do more volume.
[dupe] Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840
If i Look at all the finfluences and "get thin in 30h with my cale diet eBook"-influencer, i though it was substantially more than 10%.
Imagine going in the streets as a normal human being and advertising these companies (the scammers, I mean).
You would never see the light again, after fighting countless battles with lawyers (rightly so!), ending up in prison.
But these guys just can exploit it, because that's what they do, and literally never be accountable for it.
If my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.
ban digital advertisement
Seems low, they need to pump those numbers up if they want to compete with the trp administration, russia or twittee.
I wonder if the government and lawmakers would care if 10% of my income came from selling heroin...
Let's hope they don't let a paperclip-maximizing AI decide how to maximize revenue!
That would explain why they never do anything against obvious financial scams.
Can we fix the title to be "scams and banned items"?
It seems like the banned items bit is misleadingly left out, and this title falsely implies it is 10% from scams alone.
It's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there is literally nothing on there to see but ads.
I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be influencers.
Threads is a rounding error.
X is blah
Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime out while they still can.
Seems like the word for this is "complicit"
Tangential point:
Whilst I don't hear as much about people getting banned from their Facebook accounts as I do about Google accounts getting perma-banned with little to no recourse, it does seem that legitimate users of their services are treated as second class citizens, whilst literal scammers and fraudsters are given the white glove treatment because it contributes to their revenue.
And it must be a non-trivial contribution to their revenue, because it must be worth having their reputation smeared.
All of the hard problems they've been able to solve, and the questionable application of AI to everything, and yet they cannot solve this? Complete BS.
What a business/ethical dilemma ~not~ to solve
Meta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire strategy is in trouble
FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore.
Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed
Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that has fractured across many providers.
VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day
...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No users, no insights.
10% seems very conservative as estimates go.
I would posit that nearly 100% of their revenue comes from scams of one sort or another.
10% scams is bush league rookie stats. They gotta pump that up to play in the same league as Nextdoor.
So why are the users not adapting llms en mass to make scaming unviable?
Well, they need to be fined 10% then
Imagine if a bank admitted 10% of it's revenue came from criminals or money laundering. A staggering proportion with no government action.
They should remove the marketplace, i know so many people who got scammed
So Meta made billions of dollars so that your mom could lose her entire life savings?
100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because everything is a scam.
Scam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything about it because they aren't liable.
Repeal section 230
If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.
Why aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?
> “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.”
I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...
Their entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics.
What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs.
There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users."
It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity.
There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.
Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.