Meta Is Earning a Fortune on a Deluge of Fraudulent Ads ⇥ reuters.com

Jeff Horwitz, Reuters:

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

I am not sure what the right and realistic amount of scam-based revenue is — a real mouse poop in cereal boxes kind of thing — but 10% seems like a lot.

Some of the numbers Horwitz uncovered highlight a reason many people fall for scams, too:

Internally, Meta refers to scams like this one as “organic,” meaning they don’t involve paid ads on its platforms. Organic scams include fraudulent classified ads placed for free on Facebook Marketplace, hoax dating profiles and charlatans touting phony cures in cancer-treatment groups.

According to a December 2024 presentation, Meta’s user base is exposed to 22 billion organic scam attempts every day. That’s on top of the 15 billion scam ads presented to users daily.

Meta polices fraud in a way that fails to capture much of the scam activity on its platforms, some of the documents indicate.

Meta has 3.5 billion “daily active people”, so the company exposes each user to an average of at least ten scams per day. That is on Meta’s platforms alone. We are bobbing and weaving, and a scammer only needs to get it right one time.

Jonathan Bellack, Platformocracy:

As bad as these revelations are, what makes my blood boil is the absolute swill that Meta’s spokesperson, Andy Stone, shoveled us in trying to push back on the story.

The only reason we are getting even a small glimpse of the true nature of Meta’s business is in spite of people like Stone, and because of books like “Careless People” and reporters like Horwitz.