The manager in charge of the program warns their underlings that "We have specific revenue guardrails."

What does Meta fraud look like? One example cited by Reuters is the company's discovery of a "six-figure network of accounts" that impersonated US military personnel, who attempted to trick other Meta users sending them money. Reuters also describes "a torrent of fake accounts pretending to be celebrities or represent major consumer brands" in order to steal Meta users' money.

8

Another common form of fraud is "sextortion" scams. That's when someone acquires your nude images and threatens to publish them unless you pay them money and/or perform more sexual acts on camera for them. These scams disproportionately target teenagers and have led to children committing suicide:

usatoday.com/story/life/health…

In 2022, a Meta manager sent a memo complaining about a "lack of investment" in fraud-fighting systems.

9/

These teenage boys were blackmailed online – and it cost them their lives

Parents told USA TODAY their teenage sons died by suicide within 24 hours of being financially sextorted. Here's what they want others to know.

^{Rachel Hale (USA TODAY)}

The company had classed this kind of fraud as a "low severity" problem and was deliberately starving enforcement efforts of resources.

This only got worse in the years that followed, when Meta engaged in mass layoffs from the anti-fraud side of the business in order to free up capital to work on *perpetrating* a different kind of scam - the mass investor frauds of metaverse and AI:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah…

10/

These layoffs sometimes led to whole departments being shuttered. For example, in 2023, the entire team that handled "advertiser concerns about brand-rights issues" was fired. Meanwhile, Meta's metaverse and AI divisions were given priority over the company's resources, to the extent that safety teams were ordered to stop making any demanding use of company infrastructure, ordered instead to operate so minimally that they were merely "keeping the lights on."

11/

Those safety teams, meanwhile, were receiving about 10,000 valid fraud reports from users *every week*, but were - by their own reckoning - ignoring or incorrectly rejecting *96% of them*. The company responded to this revelation by vowing to reduce the share of valid fraud reports that it ignored to a mere *75%* by 2023.

When Meta roundfiles and wontfixes valid fraud reports, Meta users lose *everything*.

12/

Reuters reports out the case of a Canadian air force recruiter whose account was taken over by fraudsters. Despite the victim repeatedly reporting the account takeover to Meta, the company didn't act on *any* of these reports. The scammers who controlled the account started to impersonate victim to her trusted contacts, shilling crypto scams, claiming that she had bought land for a dream home with her crypto gains.

13/

While Meta did nothing, the victim's friends lost everything. One colleague, Mike Lavery, was taken for CAD40,000 by the scammers. He told Reuters, "I thought I was talking to a trusted friend who has a really good reputation. Because of that, my guard was down." Four other colleagues were also scammed.

The person whose account had been stolen begged her friends to report the fraud to Meta.

14/

They sent *hundreds* of reports to the company, which ignored them all - even the ones she got the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deliver to Meta's Canadian anti-fraud contact.

Meta calls this kind of scam, where scammers impersonate users, "organic," differentiating it from scam ads, where scammers pay to reach potential victim. Meta estimates that it hosts *22 billion* "organic" scam pitches *per day*.

15/

These organic scams are actually often *permitted* by Meta's terms of service: when Singapore police complained to Meta about 146 scam posts, the company concluded that only 23% of these scams violated their Terms of Service. The others were all allowed.

These permissible frauds included "too good to be true" come-ons for 80% discounts on leading fashion brands, offers for fake concert tickets, and fake job listings - all permitted under Meta's own policies.

16/

The internal memos seen by Reuters show Meta's anti-fraud staffers growing quite upset to realize that these scams were not banned on the platform, with one Meta employee writing, "Current policies would not flag this account!"

But even if a fraudster *does* violate Meta's terms of service, the company will not act.

17/

Per Meta's own policies, a "High Value Account" (one that spends a lot on fraudulent ads) has to accrue more than *500* "strikes" (adjudicated violations of Meta policies) before the company will take down the account.

Meta's safety staff grew so frustrated by the company's *de facto* partnership with the fraudsters that preyed on its users that they created a weekly "Scammiest Scammer" award, given to the advertiser that generated the most complaints that week.

18/

But this didn't actually spark action - Reuters found that 40% of Scammiest Scammers were still operating on the platform *six months* after being flagged as the company's most prolific fraudster.

This callous disregard for Meta's users isn't the result of a new, sadistic streak in the company's top management.

19/

As the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir *Careless People* comprehensively demonstrates, the company has always been helmed by awful people who would happily subject you to grotesque tormets to make a buck:

pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuc…

The thing that's changed over time is *whether they can make a buck* by screwing you over.

20/

The company's own internal calculus reveals how this works: they make more money from fraud - $7 billion/year - than they will ever have to pay in fines for exposing you to fraud. A fine is a price, and the price is right (for fraud).

The company *could* reduce fraud, but it's expensive.

21/

To lower the amount of fraud, they must spend money on fraud-fighting employees who review automated and user-generated fraud flags, *and* accept losses from "false positives" - overblocking ads that look fraudulent, but aren't. Note that these two outcomes are inversely correlated: the more the company spends on human review, the fewer dolphins they'll catch in their tuna nets.

22/

Committing more resources to fraud fighting isn't the same thing as vowing to remove *all* fraud from the platform. That's likely impossible, and trying to do so would involve invasively intervening in users' personal interactions. But it's not necessary for Meta to sit inside every conversation among friends, trying to decide whether one of them is scamming the others, for the company to investigate and act on user complaints.

23/

It's not necessary for Meta to invade your conversations for it to remove prolific and profitable fraudsters without waiting for them to rack up *500* policy violations.

And of course, there is one way that Meta could *dramatically* reduce fraud: eliminate its privacy-invasive ad-targeting system.

24/

The top of the Meta ad-funnel starts with the nonconsensual dossiers Meta has assembled on more than *4 billion* people around the world. Scammers pay to access these dossiers, targeting their pitches to users who are most vulnerable.

This is an absolutely foreseeable outcome of deeply, repeatedly violating billions of peoples' human rights by spying on them.

25/

Gathering and selling access to all this surveillance data is like amassing a mountain of oily rags so large that you can make billions by processing them into low-grade fuel. This is only profitable if you can get someone else pay for the inevitable fires:

locusmag.com/feature/cory-doct…

That's what Meta is doing here: privatizing the gains to be had from spying on us, and socializing the losses we all experience from the inevitable fallout.

26/

Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch…

^{Cory Doctorow (Locus Online)}

They are only able to do this, though, because of supine regulators. Here in the USA, Congress hasn't delivered a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it a crime for video-store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…

Meta spies on us and then allows predators to use that surveillance to destroy our lives for the same reason that your dog licks its balls: because they can.

27/

They are engaged in conduct that is virtually guaranteed by the enshittogenic policy environment, which allows Meta to spy on us without limit and which fines them $1b for making $7b on our misery.

Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but - as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book - he was once *careful*, worried about the harms *he* would suffer if he harmed *us*.

28/

Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune.

29/

I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Burbank (TODAY!), #Lisbon, #Cardiff, #Oxford and #London!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/

thanks as always for your work.

I hope that if even one friend swears off FB as a result of my sharing your posts on this subject, then it will be worth all the demoralising vitriol and taunting I have always, and still regularly receive, for being anti-Facebook.