A sweeping Reuters investigation has put a price tag on Meta’s tolerance for ad fraud: billions of dollars a year. For Rob Leathern, a former Meta executive who led the company’s business integrity operations until 2019, the findings expose a stark tension between revenue growth and consumer harm.
The report, published Monday, found that Meta generated roughly $18 billion in advertising revenue from China in 2024, around 10% of its global revenue, even as internal documents showed that nearly one-fifth of that (about $3 billion) came from ads tied to scams, illegal gambling, pornography, and other prohibited activity. Meta internally labeled China its top “scam exporting nation,” accounting for 25% of all scam and banned-product ads globally, according to the report.
