Meta Prepares "New Anti-Scam Arsenal" Before Global Summit
Adshine.pro12/05/20255 viewsAhead of the Global Anti-Scam Summit taking place in Washington this week, Meta has released a new set of insights highlighting its ongoing efforts to curb scam activity across its platforms. The company has backed its claims with several notable data points:
Over the last 15 months, user reports concerning scam ads have dropped by more than 50%, and in 2025 alone, Meta says it has removed over 134 million scam advertisements.
During the first half of 2025, Meta’s teams identified and disrupted nearly 12 million accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp believed to be tied to some of the most aggressive criminal scam networks.
The company has also begun using facial recognition tools to intervene when scammers use the likenesses of celebrities or public figures to deceive victims.
On paper, the figures sound significant—12 million accounts is certainly no small number.
But in the context of Facebook’s enormous scale, with a global community of more than 3 billion users, 12 million represents only a sliver of its entire ecosystem.
And when weighed against recent reporting that Meta has knowingly generated an estimated $16 billion a year from scam-related ads—ads that its systems flagged as questionable but still allowed to run—the company’s latest achievements feel less impressive.
Those revenue figures come from a Reuters investigation into Meta’s internal processes for identifying and moderating potentially fraudulent promotions.
According to Reuters, Meta “failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.”
The core issue, Reuters suggests, lies in Meta’s internal thresholds for classifying an ad as fraudulent. These standards, described as overly lenient, have allowed a substantial volume of harmful ads to continue circulating—even in cases where automated systems recognized warning signs.
The outcome: billions of dollars in earnings from scam ads, at the same time that some 23% of adults worldwide suffered financial losses to scams in 2024. Facebook ranked as the second most commonly cited platform connected to these incidents, with WhatsApp taking the top spot.
That reality casts a long shadow over Meta’s positive claims about its evolving security capabilities.
To Meta’s credit, the Reuters findings primarily examined data from 2024. And Meta now asserts that reports of scam ads have fallen sharply—by 50%—across the last year. The company may indeed be improving, but given how frequently Facebook and WhatsApp are linked to scam activity, it remains difficult to fully accept the narrative that user safety is dramatically improving.
And the consequences stretch beyond Meta. Every scam that succeeds on Facebook erodes consumer confidence—not just in one platform, but in the idea of social commerce as a whole. Victims are far less willing to try in-app shopping again, and their warnings to friends further dampen adoption.
This may help explain why social commerce has found such a stark divide between regions. In many Asian markets, users readily embrace multifunctional apps and integrated online shopping. Yet Western consumers tend to prefer keeping their entertainment and purchases separate—and the widespread presence of scams may be a major factor in that cultural split.
The same concern has surfaced on TikTok as well: persistent fears around fraud have likely hindered its efforts to scale in-stream shopping across Western markets. For platforms that hope to become digital shopping hubs, stronger protection isn’t optional—it’s foundational.
But if Facebook is not prioritizing in-stream sales, and continues to profit heavily from scam-related advertising, it is reasonable to question how motivated the company will be to address the issue aggressively.
The latest statistics indicate some progress, and Meta may very well be strengthening its defenses. But for now, the prevalence of scams across its apps remains a challenge not just for Meta, but for the health and credibility of the entire social media industry.
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