Meta Battles an 'Epidemic of Scams' as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook
56 comments
·May 16, 2025plantain
lwo32k
Cuz the primary goal is hitting revenue targets and showing "growth" in those metrics every quarter. All else is secondary. You can see what their priorities are when they talk to Wall St every quarter - https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
dandanua
Every USA company is the same. If you don't grow by 15% in a year you are a failed company. No wonder the USA is turning into fascism, you can't keep those numbers without exploiting and eating everything you can.
Black holes on Earth are created not in large hadron colliders, they are in human minds.
robertlagrant
> If you don't grow by 15% in a year you are a failed company
This just isn't true. Giant numbers of small companies out there doing just fine.
It's only if you need investment that it's hard, because the government sets a floor on what you should expect on a return with the bond market. So a business taking money has to promise a return greater than what the government will just give you.
lazide
It’s a race globally - no one wants to be the first to not keep up.
A large enough simultaneous spike to reset expectations though, and all the sudden investor expectations switch to ‘lose the least money’.
Notably, the ones who expect/require this up and to the right are generally things like mutual funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors.
You know, the ones who Grandma (or Mom) relies on to not be eating dogfood in retirement.
Also Billionaires.
matsemann
I've reported so many scam ads that someone has made to look like a link to a real news site. Like, in some field they fill in "wsj.com", and that's then prominently displayed on the ad the same place as you normally use to verify where a link takes you, but clicking it takes you somewhere else entirely. Every report have been denied, saying it didn't violate their standards.
They're just happy they get money, don't care if it screws their users. The users aren't their customers...
0xEF
And there it is. The massive scam culture of Meta is profitable for Meta, without them having to actively participate in the scams, and therefore it will remain. This problem exists for the same reason we have crooked cops in every major police department in the US; when you pay someone to turn a blind-eye to certain activities, they will probably take the money. Meta gets so much engagement from scams, AI content and misinformation that their empire would collapse without it, at this point.
pjc50
This will not improve until the platform shares proper liability. The US isn't going to do that, but the EU might be able to.
There's a reasonable argument that user generated content platforms can't survive being held liable for the crimes of their user. However, the advertising is a much smaller volume of content and they're making money directly from it.
quitit
and to take it a step further:
1. reporting such advertising doesn't do anything,
2. nor the reporting of accounts that are directly soliciting such in messages,
3. nor policing of instagram accounts whose entire profile is just photos of drugs with instructions on how to buy them
It's farcical. It's also standard for these accounts to have tens of duplicate accounts which only differ by an incremental number after their handle.
55555
I get IG story ads for cocaine, with pictures of cocaine. They go to telegram accounts run by Russians and I know people who have bought from them and they actually deliver cocaine. I also get ads for illegal poker rooms.
actionfromafar
Is this what it means when they say, US - Russia relations "normalizing"?
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sanswork
I feel like they aren't even trying. The number of times I've reported obvious stolen accounts running scams or spamming only to recieve the "we investigated and found no rules broken" has made me stop trying. Every concert listing is full of scam bots posting the exact same wording to scam people.
Given the ability to shadowban from public posting and a few hours I'm pretty sure I could write a single function to block 95% of the scams. It would be one thing if they were dealing with complex scammers but the fact is they haven't even tried to stop the very low hanging fruit that you could solve with a few regexes.
650REDHAIR
I was perma-banned on Reddit for “abusing” the report feature.
Reporting illegal firearms sales.
The post and report in question were ~6mo old at the time of review and I believe had already been deleted by either the OP or a sub mod.
I got a similar warning (but no ban) reporting similar sales on FB.
They don’t care to fix it
soco
Maybe I should stop reporting all those charity scams on Tumblr, before they think I'm being their spammer...
laweijfmvo
haven’t they claimed that their “AI” catches 99% of spam before it gets seen or something? seems like there’s even lower hanging fruit or they’re just lying.
mrguyorama
I would bet money Facebook does very little fraudulent advertising filtering, since they are explicitly incentivized not to.
But "We block 99% of fraud/spam" is an outright useless and purposefully non-informative datapoint. It doesn't tell you anything. As a statement, it is equally true both for the SuperGoodMerchant who lets through a single fraudulent advertisement a year, and it is also true for UltraScamAds who let through a million scam ads a day. It depends entirely on the rate of fraud attempts compared to the rate of legitimate requests.
An actual useful metric if you want to avoid fraud or scams would be, what percentage of ads do they run that turn out to be fraudulent?
My anecdotal experience is like 95%.
RajT88
I am not shocked. I recently had a completely legitimate experience with Facebook, no fraud or anything.
My wife opened a restaurant a few months back. We're paying for Facebook ads. The early months of operating a food business is burning massive cash, so we had a ~10 dollar payment get rejected on FB ads.
Something about this rejected payment enabled all prior ad campaigns we had disabled. We are still trying to figure it out - noticed it just today. We're in for ~85 dollars in ad campaigns for just 2 days.
Every stupid bug or dark pattern which makes a big tech company money does not get fixed. It will take getting hauled in front of congress to fix it.
kyleee
You are very lucky they didn’t attempt to take you for thousands, or tens of thousands
owebmaster
That's literal robbery
RajT88
I am keeping a list of all the things that happen like this. We noticed a weird thing with GrubHub and I told my wife, "I bet they claim it's a bug". They did.
Small businesses are prey for tech companies. That's what it feels like.
bluecalm
I tried to report a FB page of obvious car (campervan) thieves: no address, name, telephone numbers only visible on the photo (so it's more difficult to scrap/automatically detect). A lot of made up testimonials with hidden comments. The company was supposedly registered in my country but there is no way to check if it exists (we have national public registry of all companies) as no relevant data is provided. I came across the website when someone from another country not speaking my language asked me about the page and if it's legit.
FB doesn't care. There is no way to tell them what the report is about (only that it somehow violates "community standards") and they don't care to check if the company even exists.
The only thing they are battling is negative PR as they don't care to take even baby steps to prevent literal thieves advertising on their service.
SoftTalker
I don't think users really care either, as they keep using the platform. We're long past the point where I thought people would get out of the obvious cesspool they were swimming in, but it hasn't happened.
sanswork
Lock in is a real thing. I dropped the friend feed because of app spam, I stopped using marketplace because of scams, but I'm still on Facebook because 99% of the organisations and groups I need or want to be a member of use it and trying to move communities off platform just results in split communities unfortunately.
netsharc
After reporting 1 or 2 scams, I wondered "Why am I doing Zuck's work for him? I should just let the scammers be, so everyone can see what festers on his rotten creation."
Heh, not that he gives a shit, the stinking pile bought him a $900K watch, amongst other things.
ggm
Meta is or was being sued by very high net worth individuals from Australia for not blocking faked voice AI lite ads using them to sell fintech.
This wasn't some minor court case either: the person(s) have fuck you money to go the distance in the US legal system.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/19/m...
janalsncm
I think “battle” is a little generous given the actions Meta is actually taking. Battle implies constant action. Not allowing 32 strikes on fraudulent accounts before taking them down.
edarchis
They're not battling, they're profiting from it.
We all reported an obvious scam and been told "sorry, this doesn't break our standards of community, we know you're not happy but don't give a damn".
hn_throwaway_99
> The report estimated organized scamming operations—often called “pig butchering” groups—comprise hundreds of thousands of people, many trafficked after falling for fraudulent social-media employment ads. Kept in prisonlike compounds, the workers are forced to work under threat of “extreme forms of torture and abuse.”
> West said the growth of this nightmarish industry stems directly from the inaction of Meta and, to a lesser extent, its social-media peers.
> “If there’s anybody who could make a huge dent here, it’s Meta,” she said. “But there’s no hammer over their head.”
This is just f'ing evil in my opinion. Meta could do something that would make a real dent in this problem, but they don't because money.
Meta is basically like a giant leaded gas or CFC factory - they just rake in money while they spew this toxic crap that society has to deal with. If Meta disappeared tomorrow I think the world would be a much better place, and despite some issues I may have with other companies, I really can't say that about any of the other Big Techs.
Henchman21
Don't forget how much electricity they consume!
liendolucas
After reading "Careless People" when a statement comes out from Meta asserting "efforts" regarding any problem I can only think of one and only one thing: it's a lie and they don't give a s*it about it.
stevenicr
I overheard someone's tiktok person berating their followers for giving money to people on the internet. Apparently these same scammers are creating fake profiles of other people on tiktok as well and then friending and convincing people they should send money for this reason or that.. And similar to the article mentioning the half price ad guy getting irate customers, people were coming to this tiktok person' profile and asking for money back and then being shocked it was not the same person.
If this continues, people may actually stop sending money to people on the internet completely and not trust anything digital.
jajko
"send money to people" - WTF is even that? It doesn't sound like shopping for products or services, rather just emotional donations.
Maybe I am too old at this point but I have yet to meet a single 'influencer' (lol, what an idiotic term to be polite but maybe its insulting on purpose to all involved) worth a dime or my time. Quality of life and happiness lie elsewhere, ie actually doing and experiencing things rather than watching others do it.
jazzcomputer
An elderly friend of my partner's family had her Facebook account hacked some time ago. Every so often, I get a friend request from an account using her avatar with the same name, but with some characters appended or some slight different spelling.
When this happens, I submit a report to Facebook and a few days later I get a message from Facebook telling me they have reviewed my report and that they've ruled that the account is not in breach of their rules.
Any lawsuit or quagmire they get embroiled in has very little sympathy from me.
User-generated 'free' content - ok, I kind of get it. The volume is insane, the product is not viable with everything reviewed.
Paid advertising though? How is it I get Facebook adverts for drugs, with pictures of the drugs, or fake money, from BLUE TICK advertisers? Obviously zero review, LLM or human.
How is it that with paid advertising they can't have one human or even a savvy LLM in the loop spend one single CENT's worth of time reviewing the adverts?