What Meta's documents showed
On Nov. 6, 2025, Reuters reported on internal Meta documents showing the company expected roughly $16 billion, or about 10% of its 2024 revenue, to flow in from ads pushing scams and prohibited products. By Meta's own internal count, users across its apps were seeing some 15 billion "higher risk" ads a day — the ones with obvious markers of fraud.
One late 2024 document put that category's value at about $7 billion a year.
In a May 2025 presentation, Meta's own safety staff estimated the company's platforms play a part in a third of the scams that succeed in the U.S. 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.