Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. US President Donald Trump said he would be imposing tariffs on semiconductor imports “very shortly” but spare goods from companies like Apple Inc. that have pledged to boost their US investments. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Will Oliver | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta projected that 10% of its overall sales in 2024, or about $16 billion, came from running online ads for scams and banned goods, according to a Thursday report from Reuters.
Those kinds of ads included promotions for “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products,” according to the Reuters report, which was based on internal company documents. Those documents showed the company’s attempts to measure the prevalence of fraudulent advertising on its apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Meta brought in more than $164.5 billion in overall sales for 2024. Last week, the company said that third-quarter sales rose 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion and that it lifted the low end of its total expenses for the year by $2 billion as part of its massive investments into artificial intelligence.
The Reuters report cited a December 2024 document that showed how Meta each year generates roughly $7 billion in annualized sales from so-called “higher risk” scam ads, which are promotions that are clearly deceptive. Each day, Meta shows users an estimated 15 billion of these higher risk scam ads, the Reuters report said, citing a separate document.
Although some of the documents show that Meta aims to reduce the amount of bogus ads on its platform, the Reuters report also said that other documents suggest the company is concerned that its business projections could be impacted by any abrupt removal of the fraudulent promotions.
A Meta spokesperson said that the company “aggressively” addresses scam and fraud ads on its apps. The projections that 10% of the company’s 2024 ad sales came from bunk ads “was a rough and overly-inclusive estimate rather than a definitive or final figure; in fact, subsequent review revealed that many of these ads weren’t violating at all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, not the full range of actions we have taken to address the problem,” the spokesperson said.
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