Dirty Money: An investigation by the Reuters news agency uncovered internal documents by Meta Inc., the parent company of Facebook, revealing that last year, Meta made about $16 billion running ads for scams and banned goods. Worse, the company has failed to address that ethical lapse for at least three years, and shows its users about 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads every day, plus around 22 billion “organic scam attempts” such as private messages from scammers to victims. The company has internal systems to ban such ads, but takes action only when the systems are “at least 95% certain” the ads are fraudulent; meanwhile, it rejected or ignored 96 percent of users’ complaints about scammers. Before that trigger, the company simply charges the advertisers extra, boosting its own profits from the scam operations. And when users do click on such ads, its algorithms automatically show those users more of the scammy ad inventory. Last year a British regulator found that Meta was involved in 54 percent of all financial losses due to scams — more than double than all of its competitors combined. Meta’s documents estimate that the company is involved in promoting about a third of all successful scams being perpetuated in the United States, making it “a pillar of the global fraud economy.” (RC/Reuters) ...Fraud: a global industry. Meta: its leading logistics partner.
