Summary
- Documents reveal that 10% of Meta’s revenue in 2024, around US$16 billion (R$85 billion), came from fraudulent advertisements and banned products.
- According to Reuters, Meta would have adopted stricter criteria to ban suspicious advertisers, charging higher fees in auctions.
- The objective would be to divert scammers, but, financially, the platform would continue to profit from suspicious ads.
Meta’s internal reports indicate that 10% of the company’s total revenue in 2024 — around US$16 billion (more than R$85 billion) — came from advertising scams and banned products. The information was revealed this Thursday (06/11) by the agency Reuters.
The documents expose how the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp manages the vast amount of fraudulent content on their networks. Records from its finance, security and engineering divisions reveal that, between 2021 and 2024 alone, the company served around 15 billion fraudulent ads per day.
The result would be an annual revenue of US$7 billion (R$37 billion) from “high risk” ads alone (those with clear signs of fraud).
According to the Reutersdespite internal systems flagging suspicious activities, Meta adopts strict criteria for definitive banning. According to the documents, the company only removes advertisers if its systems are at least 95% certain that there is fraud.
Instead of immediately banning those who do not meet the threshold, but who are still considered likely scammers, the company would have implemented a system of higher fees to be charged to these advertisers in ad auctions on the platform.
The strategy would aim to divert suspicious advertisers by impacting their profits, reducing users’ exposure to this content. Financially, however, the measure allows Meta to continue profiting from fraudulent advertisements.
Internal reports also reveal financial restrictions placed on security teams. In the first half of 2025, the team responsible for evaluating questionable advertisers would have been prevented from taking actions that could cost the company more than 0.15% of its total revenue.
Furthermore, Meta would have internally calculated that any regulatory fines — estimated at up to US$1 billion (R$5.3 billion) — would be financially smaller than the profit obtained by keeping these advertisements on air.
To the agency, Meta spokesman Andy Stone contested the interpretation of the data. According to Stone, the documents present a “selective view”, and the estimate is “overly broad”, also including legitimate advertisements.
Stone stated that the company combats fraud “aggressively” and has already removed more than 134 million fraudulent ads in 2025.
In the sights of authorities
In addition to paid ads, the agency reveals that Meta faces an even greater volume of “organic scams”, which do not involve direct payment to the platform, such as fake profiles and fraud on Facebook Marketplace. A December 2024 presentation estimates that users are exposed to 22 billion such attempts daily.
The release of these documents comes at a time of regulatory pressure against Meta. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating the company for running advertisements linked to financial scams. In the United Kingdom, authorities say that Meta platforms were involved in more than half of payment fraud losses in 2023.
A Reuters reveals that, internally, Meta itself recognizes its flaws. An April 2025 analysis reportedly concluded that “it is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than on Google.” Faced with pressure, executives set goals to reduce the percentage of revenue coming from scams to 7.3% by the end of 2025. The plan is to reach 5.8% in 2027.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/meta-lucra-bilhoes-por-ano-com-anuncios-fraudulentos-diz-agencia/
