Absolutely wild
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.
Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.
In the internal documents, Meta weighs the costs of beefing up its enforcement of scam ads against the toll of financial penalties from governments for failing to protect its users.
Meta has also placed restrictions on how much revenue it is willing to lose from acting against suspect advertisers, the documents say. In the first half of 2025, a February document states, the team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers wasn’t allowed to take actions that could cost Meta more than 0.15% of the company’s total revenue. That works out to about $135 million out of the $90 billion Meta generated in the first half of 2025.
Even when advertisers are caught red-handed, the rules can be lenient, the documents indicate. A small advertiser would have to get flagged for promoting financial fraud at least eight times before Meta blocked it, a 2024 document states. Some bigger spenders – known as “High Value Accounts” – could accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.