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Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned $16 Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”

|Author: Viacheslav Vasipenok|5 min read| 11
Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned $16 Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”

Explosive internal documents leaked to Reuters in late 2025 have exposed a staggering reality at Meta: the social media giant projected that roughly 10.1% of its entire 2024 revenue — about $16 billion — would come from running advertisements for scams, illegal gambling, fake e-commerce, and banned medical products.

Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”And Meta didn’t just allow it. The company’s own data showed its platforms were serving users an estimated 15 billion high-risk scam advertisements every single day.

One internal memo laid it out with cold corporate precision: Meta was earning $3.5 billion every six months from “higher legal risk” scam ads in the United States alone — revenue that “almost certainly exceeds the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.” In other words, fines were cheaper than cleanup. So the scams kept running.

Internal “Revenue Guardrails” Protected the Fraud Machine

Meta didn’t just turn a blind eye — it actively limited how much fraud its own anti-scam teams could actually stop.

Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”Documents reveal the company set strict internal limits: anti-fraud staff were forbidden from taking actions that would eliminate more than $135 million in scam ad revenue per quarter.

That sounds like a big number until you realize it represented less than 1% of the total $16 billion annual haul from fraud. In practice, the team fighting scams was only allowed to block a tiny fraction of the problem. The other 99% was off-limits by design.

Meta’s own estimates suggested the company was involved in roughly one-third of all successful scams in the United States in 2024. One in every three Americans scammed last year was likely lured in through Facebook or Instagram.

Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”The scale was global and brazen:

  • A $500 million pump-and-dump scheme promoted via Facebook ads;
  • Celebrity deepfakes pushing counterfeit goods;
  • Crypto scams targeting seniors;
  • Southeast Asian criminal networks generating 16% of global scam traffic through WhatsApp.

All of it was tracked internally. All of it was monetized. All of it was allowed to continue because it was profitable.

“A Little Less Fraud” Was the Official Goal

Instead of aiming for zero tolerance, Meta executives in 2024 signed off on a multi-year “plan” to gradually reduce scam-related revenue from 10.1% in 2024 to 7.3% by the end of 2025, then 6% in 2026 and 5.8% in 2027. The target was never elimination — just “somewhat less profitable fraud.”

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back, calling the leaked documents “a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.” He described the 10.1% figure as “rough and overly-inclusive” and said the company had since determined the true number was lower because it included many legitimate ads. He declined to provide the updated number.

Meanwhile, Meta Is Facing Lawsuits on Multiple Continents

The revelations have triggered active litigation in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Australian cases focus on deepfake celebrity investment scams. UK lawsuits target impersonation of financial professionals. U.S. cases cover everything from crypto fraud to counterfeit goods.

Then Came the Layoffs

Leaked Documents Reveal Meta Earned Billion from Fraudulent Ads It Refused to Remove – Then Fired 8,000 Employees to “Cut Costs”In April 2026, Meta announced it would lay off approximately 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its workforce — and cancel plans to fill 6,000 open positions. The official reason: “to manage the company more efficiently” and offset “substantial investments” the company is making.

Those investments? Artificial Intelligence.

Meta had no problem with money — it had $16 billion in annual revenue from the very scams its anti-fraud teams were ordered not to fully eliminate. But suddenly there was no room in the budget for the people whose job was to stop them.

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The Priorities Are Crystal Clear

This isn’t cost-cutting. It’s a choice. Meta chose to keep the $16 billion fraud windfall. It chose to protect less than 1% of that revenue from being removed. It chose to invest those billions into AI instead of integrity. And then it told 8,000 human beings their jobs were the line item that had to go.

And here’s the truly chilling part: the documents are from 2024. In 2026, AI tools make scams cheaper to produce, harder to detect, and more convincing than ever before. At the same time Meta is building those very AI systems, it is firing the people tasked with catching the resulting flood of fraud.

The $16 billion figure, according to the leakers and analysts, is likely a lower bound.

Meta has turned its platforms into one of the most efficient fraud distribution networks in history — and decided the profits were worth the human cost.

What do you think? When a company’s own documents show it knowingly profited from one in three U.S. scams while simultaneously slashing the teams meant to stop them, can we still call this “just business”? Or is it something worse?

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