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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams
- zipy124 1y agoImagine if a bank admitted 10% of it's revenue came from criminals or money laundering. A staggering proportion with no government action.
- Noaidi 1y agoI wonder if the government and lawmakers would care if 10% of my income came from selling heroin...
- vintermann 1y agoThat's not the right comparison. The question should rather be, would they care if 10% of their tax revenue came from heroin sales? And the answer would depend on where the externalities from all that heroin sale happened (e.g. if it was abroad), whether the government would be expected to carry the cost of them (e.g. by having a public healthcare system), and probably also on how actually democratic they are.
- cyanydeez 1y agoSeems low, they need to pump those numbers up if they want to compete with the trp administration, russia or twittee.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoHungarian ruling party is or was at some point the largest advertiser on Google in EU so yes, the refined recommendation machine has become the perfect polarization machine especially against demographics which tend to believe what they read and watch.
- random9749832 1y agoScams seem like the norm in 2020s. Crypto, Quantum Computing startups, "AI" (LLMs), Amazon delivering fakes, electric vehicles (what happened to all electric by 2030?). Yesterday I saw that the Playstation Store started doing "personalised discounts" where they will now discount the same game at different rates for different people within the same country without explicitly telling people. Someone recently even tried to attempt scamming me when buying a burger by telling me if I want certain toppings without telling me it will cost more. Apparently now have to play mind games when buying a burger.
- miyuru 1y agoOriginal Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
- mrweasel 1y agoThat probably depends on your definition of a scam, but it seems fairly low. Many products and services advertised online just skirts the border of being scams or fraud.
- chrischen 1y agoAgreed. At best most of the stuff I ended up buying from an Instagram ad turned out to be oversold or overpromised and underdelivered. While not a scam outright, it's sort of training me to avoid buying anything from ads...
- piva00 1y agoIt got so bad that even non-tech savvy people around me learnt to do a lot of research about any product shown on Instagram ads. To me any product advertised on Instagram, or through YouTubers sponsorships, have become synonymous with overpromised bullshit if not outright scams. Every single time I see a sponsorship deal on a YouTube video I do some research just to validate it, and the vast majority of it are outright shitty products. It's been working great as a signal of what products not to buy.
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- mrweasel 1y agoOne of my theories is that there isn't actually enough honest companies buying ad space to satisfy the shareholders in companies like Alphabet or Meta. If they actually care to also filter out the ads for junk products and services, there would probably be a minor collapse in the industry.
- chrischen 1y agoHonest companies are priced out by scammy companies, and as long as these companies share the profits they are totally fine profiting off scams. They make more money off the scams, simply put.
- balderdash 1y agoI wonder what their definition of scammy is? I bet it’s pretty narrow.
- procaryote 1y agoIt catches abouth 10% of scams ;)
- stronglikedan 1y agoProbably limited to strictly criminal scams so as to avoid liability.
- cjonas 1y agoAt least 50% of the YouTube promoted videos I get are crypto currency scams where some paid actor walks you though deploying an eth contract that empties your wallet. I report every one and nothing changes :(
- Kelteseth 1y agoSame. About half of Youtube ads that I get on my AppleTV (no adblock there sadly) are now AI generated scam products.
- iso1631 1y agoMy TV has ad block for youtube. I pay 20 minutes salary per month and see no adverts at all, on TV, on phone, on computer. I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment. On the web at large, sure use an ad blocker, there's no choice there. There is on youtube though.
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- ruszki 1y agoI think it really depends on how much you use it. For example, there is no way that I would pay for Facebook. It annoys me greatly that I’m forced to use it a few times per year, and I have to sell all of my data for it, but unfortunately I don’t pay just to avoid data gathering about me, because it happens anyway, no matter what I do. But I pay happily for YouTube, because I use it daily, and my home country’s propaganda was annoying enough to make it worth.
- phantasmish 1y agoPaying Google to not attempt to scam me is... not something I plan to do.
- grayhatter 1y ago> I never understand why well-paid HN commentators refuse to pay for their entertainment. People don't want to pay (help) people they don't like. YouTube ads do not feel fair, they feel manipulative and unethical. It's expected that most people wouldn't want to willingly engage with that kind of asshattery. Contrast that with platforms like twitch. I'd say the average twitch viewer (that interacts with streams/chats) has a slightly negative view of Twitch. But many will still willingly donate dozens of subs to streamers they like. This removes ads for other people, not themselves. People think YouTube is greedy and untrustworthy. Why would you willingly feed that machine?
- getnormality 1y agoAs my children become old enough to have more unfettered internet access, I plan to tell them the lessons of my experience: that all online ads are for products that range from disappointing to fraudulent, so do your best to completely ignore them. I would hope that every parent does the same and we end up with a generation that dries up the revenue for this sick racket. I suppose the next move by advertisers will be corrupting all the other metrics of quality that I rely on. At that point, paywalled services like Consumer Reports (which has its own massive limitations) may be the only relatively authentic signals of quality left in the digital world. A convergence to that equilibrium can be predicted based on it having already happened in the financial advice industry. The dictum that "if it's free, you're the product" is just as true of old-school in-person finance as it is of the digital world, except in finance the exploitative free system has been carefully carved out by decades of industry-honed regulation.
- AbstractH24 1y agoDo you think your kids are old enough to internalize that? I assume they are somewhere around pre-teen. I don't have any kids, so asking because I don't know and am curious.
- ryandrake 1y agoI think even more general lessons are appropriate: "Anyone approaching you trying to sell you something, is selling garbage." which includes ads but also other forms of unsolicited commercial communication. Or "Anyone approaching you, when you can't figure out what it is they want, is likely trying to sell you garbage." You need to have your shields way up these days.
- getnormality 1y agoI have never forgotten this since the day I naively sat through a meandering two hour pitch from hell for James Hardie siding. Honestly, in every area of my life where I have to rely on others, someone has tried to grift me at least once. And that's only the cases where I have definitive evidence.
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- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoScam ads and the sale of banned goods. They don't do anything about it because they aren't liable. Repeal section 230 If you place these ads you should be held accountable. Meta has a duty to know who they're taking money from.
- r0fl 1y agoNot sure why you got downvoted so hard! Banks can’t take money from drug cartels. Why can meta and google take money from crypto scams ripping people off
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoRepealing section 230 scares the users here but a lot of these problems stem from a lack of liability. They say the people placing ads should be liable. This sounds reasonable but in practice they're anon overseas and can't be held accountable but Meta will still take their money!
- jcranmer 1y ago> Repeal section 230 §230 protects Meta from liability for user-generated content. Ads are not user-generated content. So repealing it would do absolutely nothing in this case.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoAdvertisers are business users and the ads are generated by them.
- kmeisthax 1y agoNaah, I'd rather not go back to the days of noted penny-stock scammer Jordan Belfort suing every online forum to hide evidence of his crimes as "defamation", thank you very much. Furthermore, the precedent that CDA 230 was intended to overturn would not help much. Fraud isn't defamation, and there's all sorts of lying you can do in advertising that doesn't rise to the level of fraud in the eyes of the law. So the courts might just decline to extend the Belfort precedent to the advertising business altogether. What you want is a law that explicitly says "CDA 230 does not apply to fraudulent advertising", explicitly defining advertising as any speech that the speaker is paying to publish on the platform. This neatly exempts all the same speech that CDA 230 was intended to protect while still allowing you to sue the shit out of Facebook[0] for taking money from scammers. tl;dr Free Speech should only apply to free speech. Money speech is not Free Speech. [0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
- baggachipz 1y agoI would posit that nearly 100% of their revenue comes from scams of one sort or another.
- buellerbueller 1y agoyou must work in adtech!
- notahacker 1y agoCertainly puts the £3m lawsuit settlement with Martin Lewis (UK consumer financial advice guru who sued because he's the go-to fake endorsement of any scam product targeting Britons using Facebook ads) into perspective. No wonder scammers are still spamming his likeness all over Facebook paid ads even though it's technically trivial for them to algorithmically flag it
- wahnfrieden 1y agoThe news here per https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report-exposes-how-meta-relied-on-scam-ad-profits-to-fund-ai/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/bombshell-report... is that Meta set an internal policy that scammers above 0.15% of Meta’s revenue must be protected from any flagging. It’s not a technical challenge. It’s something they desire to maintain and have codified.
- joering2 1y agoThis just came out yesterday but what the hell man! its like only keeping your top cocaine sellers in hope less of your people on the streets, less possibility to get caught. Everyone else out. How the heck are they not being raided and at least temporarily shut down at this exact moment? No wonder Trump is best friend of Mark as of recently... it really does scream "guilty".
- recursivecaveat 1y ago> Despite those efforts, this spring, Meta’s safety team “estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US,” 1 third of all scams, crazy.
- macNchz 1y agoAlongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in revenue in the process. Shoulder surfing while a non-savvy user browses Facebook or YouTube without an ad blocker and engages with obviously fraudulent ads is painful.
- redwood 1y agoIs there a top recommended ad blocker that has strong security Bona fides you recommend for android?
- c0brac0bra 1y agoBrave Browser
- coldpie 1y agoUse Firefox and install the uBlock Origin extension in Firefox. I also suggest turning on the Annoyances and Cookie Banner filters in the uBO settings. They get rid of many popups. Blocking in-app ads is a whole other ballgame. I don't have any suggestions for that.
- macNchz 1y agoI don’t use Android, but I understand uBlock Origin works with Firefox on it, which is kind of the gold standard on desktop, given the other browsers now restrict extensions in ways that make ad blockers less effective.
- DavidPeiffer 1y agoYes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.
- igleria 1y agoX's scam originated revenue is probably a bigger percent, but 10% is too much... Shame on Meta. edit: wow, some people REALLY don't like getting told they are knowingly contributing negatively to society.
- mk89 1y agoImagine going in the streets as a normal human being and advertising these companies (the scammers, I mean). You would never see the light again, after fighting countless battles with lawyers (rightly so!), ending up in prison. But these guys just can exploit it, because that's what they do, and literally never be accountable for it.
- bjourne 1y ago> “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.” I wonder if those who market illegal Israeli settlements counts as "legitimate advertisers": https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as-ads-promote-illegal-israeli-settlements-in-west-bank https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/31/meta-profits-as... I have a hunch that "legitimacy" is directly proportional to the dollar amount of the ad bid...
- IronyMan100 1y agoIf i Look at all the finfluences and "get thin in 30h with my cale diet eBook"-influencer, i though it was substantially more than 10%.
- jm4 1y agoIf my company inadvertently made money from scams, I would try to make the victims whole or donate that money. It's so scummy that they sit around waiting to be fined. It's just plain stupid management to document this in emails and not also document a good faith attempt to make it right. I always assume my emails could be made public after my entire mailbox was subpoenaed in a lawsuit my employer was involved in and I was deposed to answer questions about email threads and source code comments from years ago. (I didn't do anything wrong personally, but my employer most likely did.) If I'm going to discuss something that could make me or the company look bad, I'm sure as hell going to write it in a way that's defensible when it gets out.
- Havoc 1y agoMeta is cooked. It's not just scam portion - their entire strategy is in trouble FB - nobody I know actively uses it anymore. Insta - is being overrun with AI slop and given meta's stated goal of adding more AI interactions on their platforms I doubt they'll even try to get a grip on it let alone succeed Whatsapp & FB messenger - some use but has zero moat over other messengers. It's a completely fungible service in a space that has fractured across many providers. VR/meta/AI/etc - they keep trying. Maybe one day ...that leaves their adtech which only works due to their invasive tracking...that is directly dependent on their other properties succeeding: Their targeting edge comes directly from front row seats tracking users behaviour on their platforms. No users, no insights.
- clickety_clack 1y agoDisagree on WhatsApp, it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US.
- zzzoom 1y agoYeah, Whatsapp is probably the largest moat in the world atm.
- Havoc 1y ago> it’s the de facto standard messaging app outside the US. Agreed and in combination with FB messenger they've got most of the market...but what of it? They're literally competing against a donation supported app. Pause for a second and think about what that says about how little direct money there is in the space. Plus it's E2E encrypted & has significant user privacy expectations so significant limitations on how you can leverage it for their adtech biz I'm not saying whatsapp is dead or a failure as a messenger. It's a great addition to round out an ecosystem but don't think it's any good as the primary load bearing pillar of a 1.5 trillion company in the same way search is for google
- newsclues 1y agoFacebook appeared cooked after the parents of the original user base started using it (boomers). But it seems like that’s profitable because they are so dumb
- samlinnfer 1y agoA new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI don't think the analogy applies the same way. Meta simply choose to be evil not because it costs less overall but because they're unable to provide/filter actually useful ads to consumers. The rear diff is instead a filthy window but consumers don't sue for better quality because everything else works good enough and those that do crash could have cleaned the windows themselves.
- ruined 1y agoability "to provide/filter actually useful ads" is a function of moderation budget and not much else
- 1970-01-01 1y agoTo them it's all an algorithm. Human moderation is completely infeasible at their massive scale.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoAnd if the algorithm can't moderate then what? We should all suffer because doing it right isn't feasible?
- 1970-01-01 1y agoYes. You can choose to drive a broken car, not drive it, or fix with aftermarket parts and then drive it. The company that made it cannot deliver solution.
- pessimizer 1y agoThat's a quarter to a third of its entire margin. And that's what it admits to.
- jeffbee 1y ago10% scams is bush league rookie stats. They gotta pump that up to play in the same league as Nextdoor.
- dkdcio 1y agoban digital advertisement
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834840
- stusmall 1y agoOnce I got an Instagram ad for buying ketamine that just linked to a telegram channel. They didn't even bother being coy or using mispelling or slang. A simple keyword search to flag for more review would have caught it. I can't even wrap my head around what internal controls exist when something like that makes it out to users.
- seelmobile 1y agoThe bad actor serves a benign ad to the ad review system, and only serves the scam to real users. It's called "cloaking" - an interesting (but a bit depressing) topic to explore.
- zahlman 1y agoSo the ad review system is just requesting the ad from the advertiser, and not ever bothering to disguise itself? Didn't we have this shit figured out for brick-and-mortar restaurant reviews decades ago?
- igleria 1y agoAs far as I understood, the problem happens when the ad has a link to a website. I can't imagine that happening with static images or videos that don't link a website (that could be solved quite trivially...)
- herbst 1y agoYou can change the link target, but you cannot change the media afterwards without a new check.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoThat's called a broken system and implies either incompetence or malicious intent by the ad platform. The fact the ad platforms are multi-billion dollar companies leans my opinion towards malicious intent.
- iammrpayments 1y ago
- podgorniy 1y agoWhat a business/ethical dilemma ~not~ to solve
- whatamidoingyo 1y agoI've been seeing legitimate pornography on Facebook while scrolling through reels. I thought it was "just my algorithm", but co-workers brought it up during lunch. Quite a few of them are seeing the exact same ads. I've reported them a few times, but surprisingly (or maybe not), Facebook responds back with "we didn't find anything that goes against our community standards". These ads usually link to a website where you can download an application (a chat app, or some AI generation). Of course, they're not in the play store. It's frustrating when I think of the times I was flat out rejected for my legitimate ads related to programming, or a job board, or real estate, but they approve PORNOGRAPHY. What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? How could they get that approved? There has to be some cleverness going on.
- tryauuum 1y agothe obvious question to you is "have you tried adding pornography to your ads"?
- LtWorf 1y agoI've once seen an ad for escorts (literal word they used) in my area on fb. But that one did get removed.
- overfeed 1y ago> What in the world do those posters of pornography know that I don't? The power of persistence. I'm not being glib: these people probably get most of their ads/accounts blocked or banned, and have a dismal success rate baked into their business model, but they keep submitting until one goes through. Misrepresentation is another key ingredient, but I hope you're not willing to buy a network of bot or havked accounts just so you can get an ad approved.
- __turbobrew__ 1y agoYea, I have got ads for hardcore porn starting a month or two ago on Facebook. I only use marketplace, have no friends on the platform and have only used it to buy and sell as marketplace is unfortunately the only platform which is used for private transactions where I live.
- kilroy123 1y agoIt's very clear that social media is dead. My mom sometimes tells me to go look at a picture on Facebook. I'm astonished that there is literally nothing on there to see but ads. I and anyone I know only post stories on Instagram at best. My feed is JAM packed with ads and cringe people still trying to be influencers. Threads is a rounding error. X is blah Meta is desperate to move to AI because they know this. They see the data and are not dumb. They want to squeeze every last dime out while they still can.
- input_sh 1y agoMeta doesn't know anything, the last successful "product" that they built (as opposed to buying) was splitting off Messenger into a separate app. Since then, they invested heavily in providing free internet that failed (Free Basics), wasted a bunch of money on some sort of a global cryptocurrency that never even launched (Libra/Diem), tried to invent a whole new market with VR and it went nowhere, and now they're going all in on "AI" but the only thing they have to show for it are some sort of celebrity-impersonating Instagram bot accounts and some glasses whose selling point is that they're branded as Ray-Bans.
- danny_codes 1y agoFB is an extractive institution. The business model is to get people addicted and profit from it. It’s little different in my eyes from drug dealing. Well, I guess there’s a lot more harm done by FB
- seydor 1y agoThey should remove the marketplace, i know so many people who got scammed
- carefulfungi 1y agoSnakeoil on every corner these days - from online scams to text message scams to the whole supplements industry to prosperity gospel to ... it sure feels like we're surrounded by hustlers and charlatans.
- random9749832 1y agoSupplements industry? I only take whey protein and creatine from known sources. Anything on this?
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoi think they're talking about Hims-type businesses and the type of stuff that makes low/mid-level right-wing grifters their money: colloidal silver, methylene blue, anything else Alex Jones is hawking. maybe you could group Tucker Carlson's Nicotine Pouches For Christian Nationalists in there too, idk.
- mrguyorama 1y agoGuys they are putting chemicals in the water that make frogs gay!!!! Anyway you should buy my bottle of research chemicals that will make your balls bigger. Evidence? What are you, the Illuminati? Also check out this hat purported to protect your head from electromagnetic radiation even though it is shaped exactly like a lens pointed directly at your brain. Don't forget to harass random telecom repairman about how dangerous 5G is! We will be talking all about it on our app you can buy so you can watch us anywhere! I just... I just don't understand. There are people who seem to have near infinite credulity, at least for the "right" people. At least something like "Miracle Mineral Solution" had a partially fake "study" where they actually gave people a harmful thing to drink just to say they did. That guy from FoldingIdeas had a comment that resonates with me: There are people who trust something implicitly entirely because an actual authority told them not to trust it. "They believe the fake facebook story because facebook told them it was fake". But even those people are still demonstrably unable to connect past actions to current results to a point that I'm not sure how they trust that breathing is required for being alive. Like there's so much about reality that is so simple and clear and demonstrable, and they just don't seem to be at all capable of squaring even those simple facts... No, crystals can't do shit. No "vibrations" just aren't a thing. These people live in a different reality than I do, but I don't understand how they can look around them and match that to the reality they have been sold. Those pills haven't made you any fucking smarter! Haven't you noticed?! Like even Joe Rogan told Matt Walsh "Hey, you are wrong, there's really only a few thousand sex change operations a year" instead of the millions Walsh claimed and he just said "I don't believe that" and I'm like what the hell buddy do some basic math how many people do you know that got a sex change operation last year?
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- jesse_dot_id 1y agohttps://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage https://jesse.id/blog/posts/im-telling-yall-its-adbotage I wrote a blog about turning advertising against advertisers, and as I see more and more stuff like this, I wonder how the ad-based Internet survives this era of unfettered and unpunished scamming.
- josefritzishere 1y ago10% seems very conservative as estimates go.
- throw7 1y ago"...scammers obtain sexual images of a user, often a teenager, under false pretenses and then blackmail them – ... was becoming commonplace on Meta’s platforms" There you go U.K. OFCOM. Here's child endangerment propagated knowingly by Facebook. Don't worry, I know you won't do anything to Facebook because you "protecting" kids is pretext.
- swarnie 1y agoListen throw7, Meta paid almost £30 million in tax in 2023, an effective tax rate of 12%. I'm unsure why numbers for 2024 aren't available but you'll need to speak to legal about that. If you want to throw7 that all away over some media speculation be my guest. I'll tell the NHS to fund themselves for 11 minutes next year to make up the shortfall.
- siliconc0w 1y agoIf you include speculation and gambling I'd bet 10% of all economic activity is heavily dependent on either outright scams or scam-adjacent behavior.
- mv4 1y agoAs a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?
- bensonn 1y agoI wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. Hundreds of billions of dollars can make people do questionable things. -their revenue is 99% ads with more than 80% coming from FB and IG -they can only sell ads if they have a large and active user base -DAP (daily active people) is reported publicly but calculated internally -ad spending, views, and engagement are calculated by Meta's own platform Anecdote (why I think it is a scam)- I had a FB account, I needed it for a previous job but didn't want it. I set up a random email address at a host I had never used, had a made-up FB name, and used a password generator for both the email address and FB accounts. My FB account had almost no activity besides viewing company posts. FB was only used from a single desktop computer. Passwords were stored in my (local only desktop) password manager. After a couple years, FB emailed me and claimed my account was hacked. The "hacker" changed my profile picture (was a blank avatar icon) to an AI photo of a random guy. Facebook says it is hacked but they keep it visible, my two friends are still friends with the old account (they know it was hacked). FYI - I didn't care enough to send them a copy of my ID, nor did my ID match my user name, so I couldn't reclaim my account. How would a hacker combine a random username, with a random email (has not been pwnd) only used for FB, guess a ~20 character random password, etc? And why, to steal an account with no followers and to do nothing with the account? That is a lot of work and criminal charges for nothing. I am fine with FB saying the account was hacked and closing it. It has been years and the account is still live. Is it "active" and counted towards their users? They have a HUGE financial incentive to keep and count all accounts, and they have no oversite to verify accounts since it is all calculated internally with opaque algorithms.
- m_a_g 1y agoDid they take control of the email account?
- noslenwerdna 1y agoYour desktop was hacked or your email was hacked?
- phillipcarter 1y ago> I wonder how much of Meta the corporation is a scam waiting to crumble. I imagine almost none of it. Social networks solve connectivity problems that people want solved. Talk to some "casuals" who aren't in tech about how they find out about new restaurants, social trends, arts and crafts, places to go visit, etc. and the answer is Instagram or TikTok. And FB does the same but for older generations. Ads are also a fundamental revenue pillar in this world. You can layer in relevance ads for a product to anyone, at any time, for any topic. If something exists and people pay attention to it, there's a way to make money advertising around it. There's ... certainly deeper questions to be had about if this stuff is actually good for us, but in the mean time, it's very real and worth a lot of money.
- jddj 1y agoSad, because I know first hand of legitimate businesses who struggle to run Instagram ads due to unexplained blocks or payment gateway issues
- jqpabc123 1y agoGoogle and Meta are kinda like cattle ranches --- they're not being run to benefit the cattle. Users of these platforms are being farmed like cattle.
- KingLancelot 1y ago[dead]
- almosthere 1y agoSo Meta made billions of dollars so that your mom could lose her entire life savings?
- wagwang 1y agoMeta makes hundreds of billions on people collectively spending trillions of hours doom scrolling and you're worried about scams?
- almosthere 1y agoI forgot because the worst thing exists, nothing else is important. I bow down to thee oh smart one.
- diob 1y agoI tried to get Kickstarter to take down an obvious scam a while back. Best I could do was post on Reddit to warn folks though. Checked on it recently, so many comments of folks asking for shipping details / anything. Hundreds of thousands of dollars just scammed from folks. And they're still raising / stringing folks along. It's wild.
- stickfigure 1y agoThat sounds tantalizing! Link please?
- Telaneo 1y agoWhy aren't we (society) fining Meta et cetera for collaborating in scams again? Or at least having the fines actually be equal to the money they're earning so the fines aren't just cost of business?
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoForget fines, they should be liable for any losses incurred by people scammed.
- xandrius 1y agoBecause there is no "we". It's currently just who has the money and they all seem to be pal somehow.
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoI got scammed on Instagram when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy. It was christmas time, and I got an ad for a cool looking steam punk keyboard. I ordered it for my kid who had recently got into PC gaming. It was only $60, and when it didn't come I checked my bank and credit card and didn't see any charges, so I assumed that I didn't actually finish the order. Until almost a year later when I realized I paid with paypal, and they used funds I had sitting in there for some reason. By then it was too late to challenge.
- skizm 1y agoTo me this basically says roughly 10% of all internet advertising revenue is from scams. I’d bet Google has a much higher number than 10%, since they do more volume.
- schmookeeg 1y agoSeems like the word for this is "complicit"
- iamleppert 1y agoIt's also full of people selling counterfeit money as well. I am shocked how they allow it, there's a guy with a profile that shows him printing and testing his "bills" along with a link to buy them. Not trying to hide it, no code words, nothing. The same on Tiktok. I have reported it multiple times but every time they say "no violation". (facebook wouldn't copy a URL, but here he is on Tiktok): https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills https://www.tiktok.com/@blastedbills
- aaroninsf 1y agoTheir entire business model is corrupt and a significant driver of the degraded state of our society, civility, and politics. What is the core of their business? Maximizing and totalizing surveillance, in service whoever has money in hand, including those interested not (just) in selling you shit, but steering your behavior, mood, and beliefs. There's a reason for the constant drumbeat of stories about whistleblowing, lawsuits, suppressed research, literal criminality, and contempt for the wellbeing of their "users." It's not "polite" to talk about this on HN, but if you work there or do business with them, you better be at peace with your moral complicity. There's also a reason they pay so well. It's to make people hold their noses.
- p3rls 1y ago[dead]
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y agoThe key sentences: > the company prioritized enforcement in regions where the penalties would be steepest, the reporting found. The cost of lost revenue from clamping down on the scams was weighed against the cost of fines from regulators. The companies don't necessarily want scams, and they might even be willing to forgo the scam revenue itself. But if the consequence of allowing the scam is low, and the consequence of doing something about it would be a loss of non-scam revenue (e.g. by disallowing legit customers or verification requirements making customers go to an "easier" competitor), they won't do anything about it. It's time to treat them as accomplices. As the report shows - if they had to pay the damage they're helping to cause, priorities would shift and they would find a way to make the problem go away. As is, they have no reason to even try.
- wongogue 1y agoPeople advocating for regulation-free economy are just temporarily embarassed scamsters.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoLet's hope they don't let a paperclip-maximizing AI decide how to maximize revenue!
- mattmcknight 1y agoCan we fix the title to be "scams and banned items"? It seems like the banned items bit is misleadingly left out, and this title falsely implies it is 10% from scams alone.
- gummydogg 1y agoI deal with domain impersonation and fraudulent ad takedowns nearly every day. A year ago, Meta would remove fake ads falsely using my company’s branding within a day or two. Now these same ads run for over a month with no action taken. This isn’t just an inconvenience these scams cause real harm. The money fraudsters extract fuels their expansion into larger operations. Meta has become completely negligent in its enforcement responsibilities and shows no empathy for the victims it enables. Meta is the single largest enabler of this fraud ecosystem the operations fund human trafficking, force, labor, and systematic financial fraud, targeting vulnerable populations, particularly elderly victims, who lose their life savings at a point in time where they have no time to earn it back. Every dollars these criminals make through Meta platform goes to some of the most depraved actors on the planet.
- ikekkdcjkfke 1y agoWell, they need to be fined 10% then
- ChicagoDave 1y agoI actually got suckered by the 3d printer scam. My bank helped while PayPal figured it out (2 months). Facebook is still showing the fake Bambu labs ads. There’s no FBI to enforce online fraud so why would they care?
- sentrysapper 1y agoThere is. It's known as the Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3).
- ChicagoDave 1y agoSure, but I meant "is anyone answering the phone?"
- keeda 1y agoThis is why, despite being a huge fan of their engineering, I'm leery of Facebook and Google and any advertising-based tech company in the long run. The incentives to block fraudulent, malicious and even simply ineffective ads are just not there. Anybody remember this? https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out-500m-doj-over-shady-drug-ads/ https://consumerwatchdog.org/uncategorized/google-shells-out... Google stopped that practice then... or it might not have! We'll never know since, apparently unlike silly little Meta, it has been much more careful about not having any kind of incriminating internal documents or correspondence being preserved for discovery. And in any case, it could fall back to the much more lucrative business of anti-competitive manipulation of the ads market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... I've had a hint that the ad industry was rotten for a decade+ when in a prior life I saw our regional head of marketing casually throw stats on the whiteboard showing something insane like 30 - 50% of ad clicks on all major platforms being fraudulent. She was cynical but also jaded to the fact that, despite being widely known and accepted in the industry, it wasn't clear if things would ever improve. Shocked, I followed the ad industry and such reports for a while, anticipating a crash. Glad I didn't bet on it, because the crash never came. Unfortunately, there is so much money in this that it seems nothing will happen.
- estebarb 1y agoThat would explain why they never do anything against obvious financial scams.
- jongjong 1y ago100% of all revenue, of all companies came from scams because everything is a scam.
- celestialcheese 1y agoGoogle should have to make this disclosure as well. I'd guess >50% of their AdX revenue is from click-trick, fake button, scam ads. Across the board I'd expect Google's ad revenue to be at least 10% from scams, if not more. Source: a decade of running a website monetized with adx and having to hire people to manually monitor and block scam display ads multiple times a day.
- 555watch 1y agoIn my country there are obvious clones of known portals with clickbaity titles, visually hard to distinguish from real. Always with some random url. Sometimes just fake news and propaganda, sometimes selling fake things. Under paid sponsorship. Reported them multiple times. Always the response is as follows: we looked at it and found nothing wrong. All the disputes are also killed. So its done on purpose
- g8oz 1y agoNextDNS or a similar solution is absolutely essential these days. You can't always configure every device your loved ones use. And Chrome on mobile will always be a problem. NextDNS solves this for me to a large extent.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoIf 10% of my income came from scams, I’d be thrown in prison…
- tiew9Vii 1y agoI've gave up reporting scams on FB, they don't care. It always an automated response "we've reviewed the content and it doesn't break our community guidelines" or similar. These are for obvious scams, account in different country to items they are trying to purchase/sell, haven't been used in a long time and suddenly active. When selling vehicles the account tries to make you go to malicious websites to pay for vehicle checks falsely insisting the seller is legally required to do so. When 10% of their revenue is from scams, without government policy there's no incentive for FB to fix. Scams feels like a feature they silently tolerate while doing the bare minimum by providing a button and automated responses to look like they are trying to prevent it.
- GuestFAUniverse 1y agoSo, they donate to victims? 10% seems a bit high, while claiming they made efforts -- I only heard arguments for 2-3% that are hardly avoidable; Or are these numbers wishful thinking?
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoTangential point: Whilst I don't hear as much about people getting banned from their Facebook accounts as I do about Google accounts getting perma-banned with little to no recourse, it does seem that legitimate users of their services are treated as second class citizens, whilst literal scammers and fraudsters are given the white glove treatment because it contributes to their revenue. And it must be a non-trivial contribution to their revenue, because it must be worth having their reputation smeared. All of the hard problems they've been able to solve, and the questionable application of AI to everything, and yet they cannot solve this? Complete BS.
- shadyKeystrokes 1y agoSo why are the users not adapting llms en mass to make scaming unviable?
- game_the0ry 1y agoVeritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good. Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the "legitimate" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms. This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL. I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue. But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
- ruthven-elara 11mo ago[dead]