Recently, Reuters came out with a report on the amount of fraudulent advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and it paints an ugly picture. How ugly? Remember that Adweek report from 2018, when Procter zeroed out their $200M programmatic ad spend on Facebook and saw literally no drop in sales revenue?

That kind of ugly picture.

The Problem

The entire report is filled with jaw-dropping quotes and internal Meta figures, but I want to focus on one figure that floored me when I read it:

“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 misread that at first. I thought it said that it was 10% of Facebook’s programmatic ad revenue. It was only when doing a second read-through to pull quotes for this article that I realized it was 10% of Meta’s total revenue. That is, to be blunt, a fucking enormous portion of your income to realize is coming from criminals.

These aren’t minor crimes either. We’re talking major fraud, sophisticated identity theft, and worse. The report details the story of a Canadian Air Force recruiter whose account was hacked. The hackers, now in control of her account, used it to dupe her friends, including former military officers, into crypto schemes that took as much as $28,000 a head.

Despite over 100 attempts to report the problem, including reports directly from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police themselves, Meta did nothing until after at least four other Canadian military colleagues had been defrauded.

Why Can’t Meta Solve Its Fraud Problem?

By Meta’s own admission, other platforms are better at policing fraud and crime. It is technically possible. It’s just not economically possible. 10% of overall annual revenue is a huge cut. Doing anything to meaningfully impact that number would be a financial wrench in the face, as losing their reputation as the crime-friendly platform would cause further exodus of all the crime money.

There’s not a lot of indication that this is going to get any better, either. The Reuters report notes that while Meta has publicly touted its actions and promised future reductions in ad scams, it also notes that Meta has also directed much of its budget into AI and the Metaverse, both of which require enormous amounts of money. Documents obtained by Reuters indicate the official mandate for the safety team is to “Keep the lights on.

“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.”

It’s newest solution to the problem? Charge suspected criminals more. That way, they encourage them to go while making up the money from those who remain.

Great.

Four Reasons Marketers Should Be Concerned About Meta’s Fraud Problem

Now that we’ve established just how severe the problem at Meta is and why it’s unlikely to get better any time soon, let’s discuss why we should care.

1. You Are the Company You Keep

This report only confirms what has become a generally held opinion among the public – that Meta is filled with scams, bots, and AI slop. Crime isn’t a majority yet, but it’s a large enough concentration that there’s no way your ads aren’t being placed next to scammy BS.

You, I assume, are an upstanding citizen who does not engage in fraud. I assume your company and your clients are as well. Your customers do not know that. They don’t see two ads and think, “Aha, that one is a scammer and that one is good.”

They probably just think: “That one is better at scamming.”

2. Reduced Audiences

Facebook is still a huge marketplace, with over 3 billion active users. But growth is slowing and has been functionally flat since 2023.

There’s also the question of how many are bots or criminals, but that’s another day.

If Meta’s reputation for fraud continues, it’s hard to imagine this audience growing. If anything, as platforms like TikTok expand their reach, it’s easy to imagine an exodus as people flee the platform like it’s a bad part of town.

3. Lack of Partner Focus

Meta’s safety team is made up of dedicated professionals who care deeply about stopping crime and protecting people. However, the powers that be have been very public about where their focus is, and it’s not this.

If it takes over 100 complaints from military officers and the literal Mounties to get one scam stopped, what makes you think they’ll be giving you any more attention?

How can you be sure that your ads are actually being shown to the people you want to see them? Are you confident they’ll fix the problem if you find one?

4. You Aren’t Outscamming the Scammers

This is for my less ethical readers, the ones who are reading this and thinking, “Oh boy, target-rich environment!”

To quote George Bernard Shaw:

“Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty. And besides, the pig likes it.”

The people fighting you on this are much, MUCH more sophisticated when it comes to scamming than you are. They are far less afraid of the consequences, often operating out of difficult-to-reach countries. You don’t want this fight.

If you won’t listen to your inner Jimminy Cricket, at least listen to the part of you that says “Picking a fight with a person who’s much better at fighting than I am is likely to have negative consequences for me!”

What can Marketers Do About Facebook’s Fraud Problem?

No idea. Or rather, I have no idea what you should do. I’m not in the weeds of your company, and I don’t know your numbers. Shutting down your spend is likely not an option, although I do think it’s wise to start testing if it’s actually getting you anything.

(Although, hey, if you want to contact me to discuss strategy, let’s talk.)

More importantly, I think we need to reconsider social strategy as a whole. The social media marketing environment we came of age in might have been a fluke in history. No platform lasts forever, and you always need to be ready to move on when something is no longer serving you.

These companies seemed like unstoppable juggernauts for most of our adult lives. So did IBM and Ma Bell. They’re not gone, but they aren’t what they used to be.

“Past performance is not an indicator of future returns,” after all.