Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.

Dear Dr. Ads,

There I was, minding my own business and checking out Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter, when I came across this item about the latest tech world ad scam.

‘Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China…’
“…to safeguard billions in revenue.” That’s the headline on a new Reuters investigation by Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham that relies heavily on internal documents. The reporters found that Meta “decided to accept high levels of fraudulent advertisements from China” as the company “wanted to minimize ‘revenue impact’ caused by cracking down on the scams.”

WhatsApp with that, Doc? Strip-mining our data isn’t enough for Mark Suckaberg? Now he’s running Fleecebook and Instascam for Chinese fraudsters?

– Met-ad-verse

Dear M-a-v,

Let’s start with some backstory.

Last week we noted that Meta was one of the tech companies (along with Cash App, Coinbase, Match Group, and Ripple) involved in the Tech Against Scams Coalition, which had just launched a Potemkin marketing campaign purportedly to help consumers identify and avoid online fraudsters. It lasted about as long as a standard WhatsApp message, and had slightly less impact.

We also linked to Jeff Horwitz’s November Reuters piece reporting that “Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”

Now comes this Reuters follow-up piece that zeroes in on the China connection to Meta’s ad-scam haul. In that case, fraudulent advertising generated not 10%, but 19% of the company’s revenues, or $3 billion of its $18 billion Chinese take in 2024.

Meta’s own internal audits showed that “Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta’s platforms worldwide.”  The company set up an anti-fraud team that “slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.”

Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in.

“As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed.

But after Zuckerberg’s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective.

So, to recap . . .

1) Meta knows.

2) Meta don’t care.

The Doc’s diagnosis: Mark Suckaberg never met a corner he wasn’t happy to cut. Why would he change now?