Instagram and Facebook Are Overrun With Thousands of Scam Ads

After seeing one of those sketchy yet enticing ads on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve just dropped cash on a bunch of power tools or a mystery box of Amazon returns. Of course, the order never arrives.

In a fury, you call the number in the ad to speak to Edgar Guzman, the owner of the company you purchased from, who has to break the hard news to you: you’ve been conned. But not by him! By a scam artist posing as his company.

The Wall Street Journal reports that this scenario that Edgar Guzman has to deal with regularly on top of his normal day-to-day duties running a business, is common for many business owners who bought ads on Instagram and Facebook, two social media titans owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.

Guzman owns the Atlanta-based Half-Off Wholesale. To get some new eyeballs on his merch, Guzman purchased 15 ads across Instagram and Facebook. So why does Meta’s ad library contain over 4,400 ads that have used its business’s name and photos?

Those thousands of other ads were bought by scammers, mostly from overseas, from countries like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, the Philippines, and China.

Instagram and Facebook Are Facing an ‘Epidemic of Scams,’ Meta Admits

The scamming doesn’t just create another pain in the ass that small business owners have to deal with day-to-day as customers flood their phone lines and inboxes with complaints. Those misdirected complaints can eventually turn into bad reviews that affect the company’s reputation.

All of this is because Meta has become a digital flea market of scams: fake puppy sales from Cameroon, fake giveaways for random junk, and fake investment fraud schemes featuring AI-generated voices of famous people.

It’s a global fraud problem that makes everyday folks unwitting financial backers of Southeast Asian human trafficking networks, where victims are forced into fraudulent work under the threat of torture. You might’ve heard them referred to as “pig butchering” groups.

Former prosecutor Erin West has been investigating these fraud networks for years. She tells the Wall Street Journal that, “if there’s anybody who can make a huge dent here, it’s Meta. But there is no hammer over their head.”

Zuck has the power to ensure that a big source of a human trafficking network’s funding could be cut off if he cared to cut it off, but he doesn’t seem to, and there’s no pressure on him from the public or governments to do so.

JPMorgan Chase says nearly half of all Zelle scam reports between the summers of 2023 and 2024 came from Meta-related activity. The UK, Australia, and even Meta’s own internal data confirm it’s a hotbed for criminal enterprises. Despite that, the company continues to prioritize its ad revenue, which netted Meta around $160 billion last year, over protecting its users and helping to financially starve human trafficking operations.

Their legal stance here is that it’s not their problem, and a safe harbor portion of US telecommunications law called Section 230 provides platforms all the coverage they need from user-created content. People like Guzman can’t sue because Meta “has no duty to protect its users from third-party content on its platform.”

That is a direct quote from Meta itself after it was sued by an Australian mining billionaire named Andrew Forrest, whose likeness was used in scam ads in 2019 without his consent.

Until Meta starts caring about people over ad revenue, which will likely never happen on its own, at least not while it’s under Zuckerberg’s control, scammers and human traffickers will keep winning.

Meanwhile, small business owners like Guzman and even billionaires like Forrest will keep getting screwed.