Meta internally projected late last year that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue, or approximately $16 billion, would come from advertising tied to scams and banned goods, according to company documents reviewed by Reuters. 

A cache documents reviewed by Reuters reporters describes years of failures by Meta staff to prevent the social-media giant’s clients from seeing billions of fraudulent ads across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. One December 2024 document estimated users are shown 15 billion “higher-risk” scam ads every day. A separate document said Meta was earning about $7 billion annualized from that subset alone. 

Meta often flags suspicious marketers but bans them only when automated systems are ≥95% certain of fraud, according to the documents. Below that threshold, the company raises ad prices for suspected scammers as a deterrent, the news agency said. Meta’s ad personalization can also benefit more scam ads whenever users click them. 

A May 2025 internal presentation estimated Meta’s platforms were involved in one-third of successful U.S. scams, and an April 2025 review concluded “it is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google.” The documents were produced between 2021 and 2025 across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety teams, Reuters said. 

Regulators are now taking a closer look at the company, according to the report. 

The documents disclose that U.S. SEC is investigating Meta over scam ads, and a U.K. regulator found Meta products involved in 54% of payments-related scam losses in 2023, more than all other social platforms combined. 

Meta’s acceptance of revenue from suspect sources highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising sector, according to Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety who spoke to the news agency. 

“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.

Read more at Reuters