Meta likely made more money from fraudulent advertising in the UK last year than the entire news industry made from legitimate online marketing.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram has revealed in internal documents (exposed by Reuters) that around 10 per cent of its annual revenue comes from advertising placed by fraudsters.
This equates to $16 billion a year in annual revenue from enabling the fraud industry and at least $790m (£600m) in the UK alone. Press Gazette has estimated that Meta made at least £6 billion in UK advertising revenue in 2024.
Online advertising across the entire UK national and regional news industry was just under £600m in 2024 (according to Advertising Association data).
Meta is the largest online publisher in the UK, with the average Briton spending more than an hour a day on its platforms.
These may be so-called pig-butchering scams whereby people are fed real investment advice over a weeks or months to win trust, before they are then lured into making a fraudulent investment and losing their money.
Press Gazette joined the “Richard Quest” investment group and began receiving investment tips and daily messages from a fake persona called Alyssa Mendez.
The scams are effective because Facebook allows fraudsters to create promotions using trusted public figures which look exactly the same as real promotions running on the platform from the likes of Fisher Investments, RBC Brewin Dolphin and UBS.
Meta will sometimes take down scam promotions when notified. But advertisers simply create identical pages again and again using Meta’s self-serve advertising technology.
According to the Reuters investigation, Meta will only block an advertiser if it is 95% certain they are committing fraud.
Reuters also reported on a May 2025 presentation by Meta safety staff which estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.
Reuters reports that Meta has taken action to curb scam advertisers (but only in a limited way). One internal document reported that the Meta team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers had a cap of 0.15% on the amount of total revenue they were allowed to impact.
Another internal Meta document revealed that the company ignored 96% of 100,000 weekly scam reports it was receiving in 2023 from Facebook and Instagram users
A recruiter from the Royal Canadia Air Force had her Facebook account hacked in 2024, Reuters reports. It was taken over by a scammer who stole her identity and purported that she was now promoting cryptocurrency investments.
Meta ignored her repeated attempts to get the scam Facebook profile taken down. One former colleague of the woman was conned out of $28,000.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that the documents it had seen “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams”.
He said the 10% revenue estimate was “rough and overly inclusive” adding: “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.”
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