Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is making roughly $7 billion annually from advertisements flagged internally as high-risk scams. According to internal documents reviewed by Reuters, the company’s platforms showed an estimated 15 billion higher-risk scam ads every day.
Many of these ads promoted fraudulent e-commerce schemes, illegal gambling sites, and banned medical products. While Meta says its systems frequently flag suspicious advertisers, the company only bans them when its automated tools are at least 95% certain fraud is taking place. If the certainty is lower, the advertiser is charged higher ad rates as a penalty instead of being shut down.
This approach means that users who engage with scam-ads are often fed even more of them, thanks to Meta’s ad-personalisation algorithms. The internal documents estimate that scam and prohibited ads accounted for about 10.1% of Meta’s total 2024 revenue, which comes to roughly $16 billion.
Meta’s own enforcement limit is striking: the vetting team reportedly could not take action that cost the company more than 0.15% of total revenue in the first half of 2025.
In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the documents present a selective view that misrepresents the company’s work, describing the 10.1% figure as rough and overly-inclusive because it “included many legitimate ads.” He said Meta had reduced global user reports of scam ads by 58% in the past 18 months and had removed 134 million scam-ad posts in 2025 alone.
However, internal reviews show that Meta’s platforms were involved in one-third of all successful scams in the U.S., and that one regulator in the U.K. found Meta’s platforms responsible for 54% of payment-related scam losses in 2023. In short, while Meta claims to fight fraud, the documents suggest the company simultaneously profits significantly from the very ads flagged as risky, raising serious questions about how ad revenue and enforcement priorities are balanced.
The revelation that scam-ads may represent up to 10% of Meta’s revenue points to a broader business model tension: crackdowns risk reducing income, while lax enforcement preserves ad flows. In a global economy where digital ad spending is a major growth engine, this dynamic underscores how regulatory, reputational and revenue pressures intersect in tech-platform monetisation.
