alt Hacker NewsCuban: Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads; docs say $16B fraud revenue
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Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters recently won The Pulitzer Prize for "Beat Reporting" for
"inventive and revelatory reporting on Meta that detailed the technology company’s willingness to expose users, including children, to scams and AI manipulation"
The award was for a series of articles, one of which was published exactly a year ago: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
The amount of times I’ve reported obvious scam ads on instagram just to receive a “we found this to not be in violation of our terms” is so disheartening.
I wish we could ban online advertisement, it wont eliminate the scams be certainly slow them down. Running such scams across the country will be a huge barrier to an extent its costs will deter the scammers. It will revive print media, folks will start reading more as a side effect. Given the limited slots available in news papers, only real business ads will have more reach. It will become difficult for companies to make grand claims, the ads in print media itself will be one's receipt. Not to mention, nothing to personalize, so lesser threat to ones privacy. Ad business has just commoditized our attention and thus our brains. Where the companies cant influence us, they manipulate us. All these can go away with just one ban.
Facebook Marketplace is another hellhole that Meta could not care less to regulate. Beyond the fact that virtually all commerce platforms have some mechanism to prevent scams, which of course Facebook completely omits, the sheer amount of ilegal products/services sold there is terrifying.
Regarding the fact that “Meta does not make money from Marketplace itself”, this could be true at face value, nonetheless there is a significant amount of users on Facebook only for this feature in particular. In turns this represents more customers to serve ads to and profit from them.
Same on Google and Youtube. The CEOs and controlling shareholders should be sent straight to jail. Deliberate profiteering from crime!
I worked as a media buyer for a few years in the beauty sector (and other stuff). I remember very well how then-Facebook treated us based on how much we spent. For example, we couldn't use before and after picture. I remember tracking down our big-spender competitors using the worst of the worst stuff to sell. While the business manager would simply reject our ads. When we started scaling the spending the ads would still get rejected, but we had a contact inside fb who would reverse the rejection. I never went rogue but I know very well how they would simply allow almost everything you need once your spending was tied to the projected revenue the facebook manager needed to reach for the company.
Initially reading the title my mind thought "Cuban...Cuban defector/intelligence agent?! Oh wow I wonder what they have to reveal?"
It's Mark Cuban. Still worth reading tho. But I found my own personal reaction fascinating because I am not sure I would have clicked through if the title included the full "Mark Cuban".
Large advertising platforms need legislation akin to know your customer in banking. He advertiser needs to know their identity and make an assessment of their risk for fraud and suitability as a counterparty. 0
Reuters report from a year ago:
> Meta internally projected that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods
> But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
A German finance YouTuber successfully sued Meta for scam ads that used his face and brand: https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-scam-ads-ruling-germany-fra...
These companies were profitable on higher quality ads in earlier years. Does this drop in quality indicate the ad well has run dry, so to speak? Or the demands for revenue are greater, necessitating a drop in standards?
The megacorps becoming criminal organizations is a logical and inevitable consequence of them being able to do whatever they want with impunity.
Meta has to invest more money into screening advertising so they ban more ads and therefore make less money.
Unless there is a genuine financial (or legal) impact, they have no incentive.
Companies in the US still use a huge array of known harmful ingredients because they work better and are cheaper.
Blame the government for lack of regulation, that's what they're there for.
Regulations are so strong on what a newspaper or magazine can print. It is a shame regulators are not set to enforce the same standards on social media.
Yes they were doing the same is Australia ... I wouldn't know if they're still doing it here since one of the favourite scams used an Australian who took them to court. [1]
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-11/andrew-forrest-meta-s...
It's pretty crazy this is tolerated by society, I know several older people scammed using Metas products.
And that isn't even counting the Instagram ads my wife falls for.
I install ublock on every friend computer that I come across. Ads are a scourge, and people working in adtech are soulless. Induced demand distort the market, making them ineffective, ad networks sometimes serve malware, and all network serves scam ads and face no repercussions.
I worked in a team that was only tangently related to this. There are hundreds of people at Meta who knew this was going on.
> Before Meta bans an advertiser, its automated systems must peg the account as at least 95% likely to be running a scam, the documents say. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer simply pays more per ad and stays live.
Wait, what is their justification for charging you more for ad but not banning you? You are probably but not certainly a scammer, so we charge you more?
Is there something that makes this not what it appears from how OP described it, FB asking suspected scammers to increase the profit-share with meta?
For a while there was a deepfake scam in Italian in FB which looked like a TV news with well known journalists announcing everyone would get money for free using some crypto thingy, followed by am interview with the prime minister saying they looked into this and it was safe.
The level of carelessness was astonishing to me.
Two weeks ago, I know two distinct octogenarians that got independently scammed by a deep-fake Bill Gates selling brain supplements.. thousands of dollars charged when they thought they were buying ~$100 .. so scam on scam on scam.
I do not know if they were on Facebook. But they had no reason to suspect it was fake (beside the obvious why would Bill sell you supplements, but they tie it as one of his Alzheimer's Research successes).
Not just Facebook! I also regularly get obvious scam AI-generated ads on YouTube, e.g. for a weed killer with a video that shows the weeds wilting as soon as the substance is sprayed on, while the grass is completely unaffected. Or a car scratch remover that instantly returns any color of car to an as-good-as-new state. Or instantly adjustable glasses that work for any kind of sight impairment. Or (while it was still warmer) a miracle miniature air conditioner that could cool any room down in minutes without needing an external unit. Etc. etc. etc. All developed at or endorsed by serious-sounding universities or institutes (that have probably never heard of these products, same as Mark Cuban).
Not different from harmful content. 16 billions fraud establish a pattern which makes a company liable. I would start by paying back the amount with on top a considerable fine (the kind of fine painful enough to remind you not to do it again), then a warning with penal prosecution next time.
One of Polish billionaires/entrepreneurs was often featured in scam adds on Facebook (the adds that trick you into “investing” into “crypto”, and similar). Of course not only he — a lot of celebrities or politicians.
Anyways, he takes it to court and even started a campaign to raise awareness of how much money meta makes in Poland out of scams.
Notes: - Rafał Brzoska https://notesfrompoland.com/2026/08/27/poland-asks-eu-to-fin... - Usually there’s no crypto: scammers will show you a fake portal and steal your money
So do all of them.
Google is quite terrible, too, make no mistake, I've had gigs where some ads were under attack from competitors click bots, not very sophisticated ones, mind you, and the Google ad console is completely useless, you have to have cf, find the traffic data there then submit to Google and pray they'll refund a bit, this is well after you been charged.
Now this very client who tasked me with this, in the console I'd of course see the Google flags where they say they might end the campaign because misleading this , non conform that etc but they give you all the time in the world for the "fix" while taking the money and while overlooking bot clicks.
Terrible and I guess industry standard "let it happen so long you have plausible denial cause"
Can we do YouTube next? Every YouTube ad these days is deception and fraud.
We've completely normalised big tech pushing straight up scams on the population.
The ad Yahoo puts in this article is amazingly ironic
> Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
Why would they change their decade long standing "scam ads are accepted since they're good for profits" policy, just because AI emerged?
What are they supposed to do, not run AI deepfake scam ads?
Ok every business has a dirty secret. But Meta’s entire business is a slate of dirty secrets.
It isn't a "Scam", it's "optimizing ad revenue"
Zuckerberg, enemy of humanity.
Once again this makes me feel that if Facebook/Meta would disappear, the world would be a bit better place.
Meta has no moral compass and does not care whom they harm.
I don't think he is telling anything new.
Remove section 230 fixes this problem. Every other business is responsible for what happens at their place of business/publications/sites. Social media sites follow the same rules as everyone else.
As reported on by CBC news and others:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/vietnam-canadians-fake-ai-9.7...
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2151393/more-fake-cb...
https://mediatechdemocracy.com/en/publications/ai-scam-platf...
general search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=cbc+news+...
It seems quite obvious that Facebook knows and doesn't care, because it's revenue.
I have a terrible idea: an ad blocker that only blocks AI generated ads. It submits the ad image/copy to Gemini and if it is not a fake product the ad is displayed. I'm confident that Gemini would do a pretty good job at identifying these scams and that the extension would demonstrate how easy it would be for Google to do it themselves. If they and their employees cared.
I could LLM this up but eh. It won't actually convince Googlers to do the right thing so it'll just stay a terrible idea.
I know Snap might not be that popular here, but what is your experience with Snap ads? Same amount of scam or more?
Someone should set up an AI agent that clicks around Facebook, detects scam ads, reports them to Facebook, and then, if it still sees the same ad an hour later, file a lawsuit. One per ad. Demand that they preserve records related to how many other people may have seen that ad.
No amount of hate this fucking company gets will ever be enough.
Advertising really does seem to be at the root of a lot of societies evils.
Have you guys got AI ads for Tai Chi Walking thst supposedly melts fat in 45 days by just walking?
When a business like meta turns to scummy/scammy revenue sources it signals that their core business has serious problems.
The irony behind this article serving AI slop ads that are likely malicious.
How bad do you have to be so even Cuban says it's shit?
eBay is also knowingly complicit in enabling completely fraudulent sellers, by policy, at scale.
It improves their bottom line, so everyone there is disincentivized to fix it.
The main issue is that most ads are scam anyways. Where do you draw the line?
The Gordon Ramsey pans are not considered scam, but they’re still highly priced garbage sold by a greatly misleading ad.
The Tai Chi thing is clearly a scam, but it’s lying just a little more than the pans ad, and pointing you to a definitely more predatory business.
But they are not fundamentally different…
Make advertisers liable for the ads they run. Force them to vet ads or simply not run ads.
If Meta is accepting so many ads they can’t review them then too bad for them. Hire more people or accept fewer ads.
Ideally this will result in a complete obliteration of the ad industry with only a small number of high quality ads surviving.