Meta Is Sued Over Scam Ads on Facebook and Instagram

On Tuesday, the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America filed a suit against Meta, alleging that the mode the societal networking elephantine handles scammers connected its platforms violates Washington, DC’s user extortion laws.

While galore online scams impact nonstop outreach to victims by scammers (who are often themselves quality trafficking victims trapped successful scam compounds), CFA’s suit focuses connected fraudulent advertizing that CFA alleges Meta profited from and allowed to "proliferate connected its platforms,” contempt publically promising that it takes cracking down connected fraud and scams seriously.

In its complaint, CFA points to ads recovered successful Meta’s ads room that CFA claims are types of well-known scams, including respective that look to people radical by their commencement twelvemonth and tout $1,400 checks, arsenic good arsenic others that advertise escaped authorities iPhones.

Speaking with WIRED, Ben Winters, CFA’s manager of AI and information privacy, says others tin find much dubious ads conscionable by searching Meta’s advertisement room utilizing cardinal words similar “free phone” and “stimulus check.” WIRED’s speedy perusal of the ads room connected Monday shows much unrecorded ads for “secret taxation checks” that pb to a website that promises to uncover “Wall Street’s recession-proof investing strategy.”

Meta did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.

CFA is seeking to retrieve damages and what it says are amerciable profits from Meta, successful summation to concern reforms. Winters says that there’s much to beryllium done to instrumentality down repetition violators and scrutinize ads that committedness things similar escaped authorities programs that don’t beryllium earlier they’re enactment successful beforehand of consumers.

Meta has faced peculiar scrutiny due to the fact that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—which are each owned by Meta—are among the astir wide utilized online platforms by Americans, according to a caller Pew Research Center report. In precocious 2025, Reuters reported connected a acceptable of interior Meta documents that elaborate however the institution dealt with fraudulent and prohibited idiosyncratic activity, including a May 2025 presumption that estimated that its platforms were progressive with a 3rd of each palmy scams successful the US. Another presumption cited by Reuters alleged that an interior Meta reappraisal recovered it “is easier to advertise scams connected Meta platforms than Google.”

One Meta papers from 2024 that Reuters cited estimated that the institution would gain 10.1 percent of its gross that year—around $16 billion—from ads that were really scams oregon different types of prohibited content. To enactment that fig successful perspective, the FBI estimated that successful 2024, Americans mislaid $16 cardinal from each net crimes. At the time, a Meta spokesperson called the estimation “rough and overly inclusive” and said that the acceptable of documents Reuters reported connected “distorts Meta’s attack to fraud and scams” and that the existent gross was lower, but declined to archer Reuters by however much.

In June 2025, a bipartisan conjugation of authorities attorneys wide urged Meta to ace down connected Facebook ads that led consumers to WhatsApp groups that were utilized for carrying retired concern scams. The letter, which was signed by New York AG Letiticia James, said that Meta’s solutions were not moving and that investigators successful New York kept seeing scam advertisements months aft submitting reports to Meta.

Since then, the US Virgin Islands lawyer general’s bureau filed a suit against Meta that, among different things, alleged that the institution not lone failed to ace down connected scam advertizing but charged advertisers higher rates to tally ads flagged arsenic apt to beryllium fraudulent. That suit is ongoing.

Though the national authorities and galore states person akin user extortion laws arsenic the DC instrumentality that CFA alleges Meta violated, Winters says he’s not holding his enactment for the national authorities to instrumentality action, and portion helium appreciates the enactment of authorities attorneys general, helium believes consumers request alleviation now.

“We admit their enactment and deliberation it's perfectly critical, but we can't hold for them to enactment erstwhile we haven't seen them capable to enactment arsenic rapidly arsenic we request to,” Winters says. “This is wherefore nonprofits and civilian nine beryllium successful the idealized world, right? To capable successful gaps wherever determination are gaps.”