Meta grosses 7 billion dollars a year from commercial scams, and he knows it

Meta, the company that manages these two social networks as well as WhatsApp, collects seven billion dollars every year from fraudulent advertisements. And thanks to an investigation just published by Reuters, we know that Meta executives are perfectly aware of this situation and have decided not to do anything, because the amount of any fine from the authorities would be less than what it collects.

Not only that: when Meta realizes that an advertiser is cheating, it often doesn’t block him, but simply makes him pay more to continue publishing his commercials that deceive users. In other words, Meta earns more from a scam advertisement than from an honest commercial. It’s not a theory: Meta’s internal documents say so.

Most of the scams on its social networks come from operators who are indeed detected by internal fraud monitoring services, but Meta only blocks these advertisers if these automatic systems are at least 95% sure that a scam is taking place. If the percentage is lower, Meta simply charges the advertiser more for each spot, but does not block it.

They then agreed that they would try to reduce takings related to scams, illegal gambling and prohibited goods from around 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3% by the end of this year. They have the means to block scams, but they apply them sparingly so as not to cause too sudden drops in company turnover

In fact, Meta on its social networks fosters an ecosystem of unpunished and well-equipped scammers who steal user accounts and take control of them to spread their scams using the identities of the victims. In this way, the friends of those victims will believe that the cryptocurrency investment advice comes from a trusted person, and they will more easily take the bait.