The company behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram expected to earn 10% of its income last year – about £12.15bn – from scam adverts and banned goods.
Internal reports for Meta, seen by Reuters, said the tech company had estimated that its social media platforms show users 15bn adverts a day for such things as fraudulent investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products.
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Meta only bans advertisers if its automated analysis is 95% certain that they are committing fraud. Otherwise, it charges suspected scammers a higher advertising rate as a penalty to dissuade them, according to the documents. They also note that those who click on scams will be sent more of them.
An internal review in April 2025 concluded that “it is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google”. Redundancies had affected the company’s ability to react, the documents say, but Meta is trying to reduce the percentage of income from such sources to 7.3% by the end of 2025 and below 6% in 2027.
Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said the documents presented a selective view that distorted the company’s approach to fraud. “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content.” He added that reports of scam adverts had fallen by 58% in the past 18 months and 134m pieces of illegal content had been removed this year.
Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images