Report: Meta earns about $7 billion a year on scam ads

Meta would be doing a lot money thanks to fraudulent advertisements.

A new investigative report from Reuters, citing Meta’s own internal documents, reveals that the company’s platforms serve an average of about 15 billion “higher risk” fraudulent ads to their users every day. Reuters reported that a 2024 document showed that Meta earned about “$7 billion in annualized revenue” each year from these fraudulent ads.

Internal documents revealed by Reuters show that Meta expected up to 10% of its advertising revenue for 2024 “to come from advertisements for scams and banned products.”

Reuters wrote:

“A series of unpublished documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social media giant failed, for at least three years, to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed the billions of users of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products.”

Fraudulent ads have become commonplace in online life, and Mashable has repeatedly reported on fraudulent ads on Facebook over the years. You might see a Facebook ad for an AI-powered photo editor and download malware. Or you might see one for Joann fabrics – except that’s also a scam. The new report suggests that this is actually a lucrative part of Meta’s advertising business.

The Reuters report also found, according to internal documents, that Meta “only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict that marketers are at least 95% certain of committing fraud” — while other likely scammers are simply charged a higher rate as punishment. So, yes, it might give scammers pause – but it would also make Meta a lot of money. Billions of dollars a year, in fact.

So the next time you click on an ad on Facebook or Instagram, be careful.