In April this year, the Financial Times published a column of mine on a “deepfake” on Instagram, one of Meta’s platforms. A former colleague had brought it to my attention in March, because the fake purported to be me. But this Martin Wolf gave investment advice, which I would never do. The Financial Times persuaded Meta to take it down. But it soon reappeared. We were playing “whack-a-mole” with scammers.
In the end, I was enrolled in a new Meta system that uses facial recognition technology to combat such scams. This worked: the deepfakes disappeared. My conclusion is that Meta can stop them if it is determined to do so.
Unfortunately, this was not before they had been widely circulated. A colleague told me there were at least three different deepfake videos and multiple Photoshopped images running over 1,700 advertisements with slight variations across Facebook and Instagram. Data from Meta’s Ad Library showed these ads reached over 970,000 users in the EU alone – where regulations require platforms to report such figures. Worldwide, the number exposed to the ads must have been a multiple of this.
Many people I know have had the same experience. Earlier this month, a statement from Berkshire Hathaway warned people not to be fooled by videos purporting to be of Warren Buffett himself, which had appeared on YouTube. It added that “Mr Buffett is concerned that these types of fraudulent videos are becoming a spreading virus”.
READ MORE
Two recent reports reveal the scale of what is happening. One, by Jeff Horwitz of Reuters, appeared under the headline “Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show”. This stated that “Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10 per cent of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion (€14 billion) – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show”.
“A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters,” the report went on, “also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent ecommerce and investment schemes.”
The story notes that “much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems”. Yet evidence shows that the company only bans advertisers if its systems predict that the marketers are at least 95 per cent certain to be committing fraud. So what happens if the probability is lower? According to Reuters, “Meta charges higher ad rates”.
[ ‘Tis the season to be scammed: shoppers fall for rogue websitesOpens in new window ]
This is a system designed to increase the profitability of posting ads deemed highly likely to be fraudulent. Worst of all, Meta’s algorithms ensure that people who click on scams are likely to see more of them.
The Reuters report is based on documents created within Meta between 2021 and 2025. Meta spokesman Andy Stone is reported by Reuters to have said that the documents “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams”, adding that “we aggressively fight frauds and scams”.
How AI is beginning to wreak havoc in the jobs market
Maybe so. But in our experience Meta only acted effectively after many complaints from the FT. This supports the hypothesis that it can act, but is in no hurry to do so. As Reuters also notes: “A May 2025 presentation by [Meta’s] safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US.”
This “virus”, as Buffett rightly calls it, does not only damage the people who trust fraudulent ads. There is also the supply side of the business.
In October, the British government published a document stating that “across south-east Asia, scam centres are using sophisticated schemes, including scams in which people are lured into fake romantic relationships, to defraud victims on an industrial scale, including in the UK. Those conducting the scams are often trafficked foreign nationals, trapped and forced to carry out online fraud under threat of torture.”
A story by Srinivasan Ramani, published in The Hindu at the beginning of November, under the headline “How do scam hubs in south-east Asia operate?” told of the escape of some 500 Indian citizens from “the KK Park cyber crime hub in Myawaddy township, near the Thailand border in south-eastern Myanmar”. This hub was recently taken over by the Myanmar junta.
The article explains that the “Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) calls these ‘compound crime’ facilities industrial, jail-like complexes where thousands are trafficked and forced to commit cybercrimes.
Traffickers post fake job advertisements for high-paying IT and marketing roles. Victims from India, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Africa, and Latin America are flown to regional hubs like Bangkok, then trafficked overland and forced across borders into Myanmar or Cambodia.
Once inside compounds secured by high walls and armed guards, victims’ passports are confiscated. They’re told they’ve been ‘sold’ and must work to pay off their ‘debt’, enduring 12-hour workdays running online scams. Those who refuse face torture – beatings, electric shocks, starvation, and solitary confinement.”
These activities, then, have huge numbers of victims at both ends. In between are hugely powerful and profitable social media companies, where, as Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote, rule. Meta claims to be doing its best to curb this plague. But this is untrue.
It could, for example, eliminate all financial advertisements that cannot be proved to be legitimate to a very high degree of probability. That is what one would expect of any publisher. But social media platforms are different. It has been made impossible to hold them liable for content that appears on the sites. That would be “censorship”.
Yet Meta and other similar platforms are accessories to fraud. The costs of this are not only to the fooled and the coerced. They include damage to trust. The mass proliferation of what are certain to become ever more convincing fakes is lethal to the financial system.
The remedy is obvious. People should be allowed to sue the platforms for full reimbursement of costs they incur from being tricked by the fraudulent advertisements they publish. Once this is allowed, these advertisements will surely disappear. Fraud is a crime. Profiting from fraud must be stopped. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
