- Damning PK Press Club report reveals Meta’s reluctance to tackle scams
- 10% of Meta’s revenue apparently comes from fraudulent ads and illegal content
- Meta considered risk reduction under threat from regulators
The number of fraudulent advertisements and less-than-legitimate product listings on social media platforms certainly appears to have increased significantly in recent years, but a new report claims that the websites themselves may be partly to blame.
Internal projections seen by PK Press Club reveal that Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, apparently makes 10% of its annual revenue from advertising scams and banned products, or about $16 billion.
Documents also suggest the social media conglomerate “failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads”, leaving billions of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp users at risk from the fraudulent ecosystem.
A so-called repression
Over the years, Meta has publicized its efforts to undertake “major crackdowns” on organized crime, pig slaughter scams and social engineering attacks – even going so far as to remove up to 2 million accounts from the Facebook platform.
Meta said TechRadar Pro it “aggressively fights fraud” on its platforms, “because users of our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it, and we don’t want it either.”
“Scammers are persistent criminals whose efforts, often led by ruthless cross-border criminal networks operating on a global scale, continue to increase in sophistication and complexity. As scam activities become more persistent and sophisticated, so do our efforts. Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that misrepresents Meta’s approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, and not on the full range of steps we have taken to resolve the problem.
But these new documents revealed that even marketers suspicious enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal alert systems are often allowed to continue, only being banned when the fraud prediction reaches 95%.
This means that if Meta is 94% sure that an ad is defrauding its users, it is allowed to continue. Surprisingly, Meta actually does more money from ads it considers scams – charging a higher ad rate as a penalty.
So, is Meta really incentivized to weed out scammers who prey on users? Even Meta doesn’t think so.
In the documents, Meta reportedly assessed the revenue it earns from fraudulent advertisements and the regulatory fines it says are inevitable if these high-risk fraudulent advertisements are not mitigated. Note here that Meta is not suggesting it would voluntarily do more to police advertisers to protect consumers, but would instead act under threat of looming regulatory sanctions.
Thousands of scams have been spotted on Meta platforms with varying degrees of success and severity, but criminals are undoubtedly making a lot of money from these tricks (just like Meta). In the UK, Meta products were involved in up to 54% of all payments-related scam losses in 2023, the report reveals – highlighting how endemic this problem is, making it all the more abhorrent that Meta chooses to continue profiting from it.
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