"Even when advertisers are caught red-handed, the rules can be lenient, the documents indicate. A small advertiser would have to get flagged for promoting financial fraud at least eight times before Meta blocked it, a 2024 document states. Some bigger spenders – known as “High Value Accounts” – could accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down, other documents say.

Fraudulent ad campaigns can reach massive size: Four removed by Meta earlier this year were responsible for $67 million in monthly advertising revenue, a document reviewed by Reuters shows."

"Meta also was ignoring the vast majority of user reports of scams, a document from 2023 indicates. By that year, safety staffers estimated that Facebook and Instagram users each week were filing about 100,000 valid reports of fraudsters messaging them, the document says. But Meta ignored or incorrectly rejected 96% of them.

Meta’s safety staff resolved to do better. In the future, the company hoped to dismiss no more than 75% of valid scam reports, according to another 2023 document.

Erin West, a former Santa Clara County prosecutor who now runs a nonprofit devoted to combating scams, said Meta’s default response to users flagging fraud was to ignore them."

"A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S. Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its main competitors were doing a better job at weeding out fraud on their platforms.

“It is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google,” concluded an internal Meta review in April 2025 of online communities where fraudsters discuss their trade. The document doesn’t lay out the reasons behind that conclusion.

The insights from the documents come at a time when regulators worldwide are pushing the company to do more to protect its users from online fraud. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Meta for running ads for financial scams, according to the internal documents. In Britain, a regulator last year said it found that Meta’s products were involved in 54% of all payments-related scam losses in 2023, more than double all other social platforms combined."