Internal Meta Documents Spotlight Regulatory Void Around Fraudulent Social Media Ads

According to a December 2024 presentation, users on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were exposed to an estimated 15 billion high-risk scam advertisements each day, the documents reveal. The scale is even larger when including “organic” fraud, such as non-paid scams in posts, groups, and Marketplace, which reached 22 billion daily exposures.

In regulated sectors like banking, securities and telecom, earning substantial revenue from fraud would raise immediate red flags. But the digital advertising market largely lacks the sort of guardrails that protect consumers in other industries.

“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” Sandeep Abraham, a former Meta safety investigator who now runs the consultancy Risky Business Solutions, told Reuters.

With no comprehensive federal rules dictating how social media companies must police fraudulent advertising, Meta established its own thresholds and enforcement logic, often explicitly calibrated to minimize revenue impact. Advertisers were banned only when automated systems predicted a 95% likelihood of fraud, an evidentiary standard far above what most regulators require for consumer-protection enforcement.

If the system detected significant risk but fell below the removal threshold, Meta did not remove the ads; instead, it charged suspected fraudsters higher rates through a mechanism known internally as “penalty bids.”

The records show the company placed strict limits on the financial cost of enforcement. In the first half of 2025, Meta’s ad-integrity teams were instructed not to take actions that would eliminate more than 0.15% of projected revenue, or about $135 million out of $90 billion, effectively capping how aggressively staff could act against known or likely scammers.

In a statement provided to Reuters, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the leaked documents “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.” The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was “rough and overly-inclusive,” Stone claimed.

“The assessment was done to validate our planned integrity investments – including in combatting frauds and scams – which we did,” Stone said. “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.”

Read more: Zuckerberg Consulted Attorney General as Meta Faced Antitrust Scrutiny

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently investigating Meta’s role in disseminating financial scams, although not necessarily through advertising. The U.K. payments regulator determined that Meta’s platforms were implicated in 54% of all payments-related scam losses in 2023. Yet Meta’s internal models estimated that fines for scam-related violations would top out at around $1 billion, far less than what the company would lose from voluntarily reducing scam-ad revenue.

Meta’s activities in the U.S. and U.K. are directly attributable, at least in part, to a lack of comprehensive regulation around online advertising in those countries. The documents show the company responded to ad fraud more aggressively in jurisdictions where regulatory action was imminent. Senior executives adopted a “moderate” enforcement strategy focused on countries with the greatest near-term legal exposure, while plotting a gradual reduction in scam-derived revenue globally, from 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3%, in 2025 to avoid disrupting business projections.

Taken together, the documents demonstrate that the global regulatory architecture has not kept pace with the risks created by digital advertising markets. As platforms increasingly operate as primary distribution channels for financial services, health products, and commercial transactions, the absence of rigorous standards for fraud detection, advertiser verification, consumer redress, and reporting obligations has allowed an online fraud economy to flourish.