What if the platforms we trust to connect us with the world are making money from the very scams that put us at risk?
This one started close to home. I spent my own money promoting a product online and didn't make a single sale — and that got me thinking a lot more seriously about the advertising ecosystem, and who actually benefits from it. Because here's the thing I kept coming back to: when you pay to promote something, you're buying attention from a machine that doesn't particularly care whether what it shows people is real.
Quick reminder of the rules: I don't rate or review podcasts, and I couldn't possibly cover everything happening out there. I'm a truck driver who listens to a lot of them each week. I find the themes that interest me, do some further research or add my own introspective thoughts, and record it all here — partly in hopes it's interesting to you, and partly because this is how I learn best: listen to it or read it, write it, teach it, boom, it's solidified.
The conversation that kicked this off
This week's episode starts with a clip from Joe Rogan Experience #2567 with Mariana van Zeller — she's the journalist behind Trafficked and the new NatGeo special Super Scam Me — talking about scam ads on social media. The segment that got me was her point that the scam economy isn't some dark corner of the internet anymore. It's right there in your feed, dressed up like a normal ad, and it's enormous.
The numbers back her up. A Consumer Federation of America report puts total scam losses in 2025 at around $148.2 billion — roughly $400 million a day — and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $20.9 billion in reported losses alone. The FTC reported $12.5 billion for 2024. And the platforms where people keep running into these scams? Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — all Meta.
The Reuters investigation
The centerpiece of this episode is the Reuters investigation by Jeff Horwitz — "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show" (November 2025), reporting that later won Horwitz and Engen Tham a Pulitzer. According to internal Meta documents, the company was projected to earn roughly $16 billion — about 10% of its 2024 revenue — from scam and banned-goods ads.
Here are the details that stopped me cold:
15 billion high-risk scam ads shown every single day. That's the scale of what's flowing through the system daily.
The 95% rule. Internal documents say Meta bans an advertiser only when it's at least 95% certain the ads are fraudulent. Below that threshold, suspected scammers aren't removed — they're charged "penalty bids," meaning they pay more per auction to keep running. The system doesn't stop them. It taxes them.
Click one, get more. The documents show that clicking a scam ad makes the system show you more of them — the algorithm treats engagement as interest, even when the engagement is with fraud.
Weekly "Scammiest Scammers" reports. Meta tracked its worst offenders internally, week after week, while the ads kept running — even as users were filing roughly 100,000 scam reports a week.
And this isn't just about one company's ads. The episode also gets into the influencer and affiliate side of it — how anybody can become an affiliate, how every link click kicks money back to the promoter, and how that incentive structure turns regular people into part of the machine. I got those TikTok affiliate messages myself once I hit 1,000 followers. Everybody wants the extra money. Almost nobody asks what they're actually promoting.
Then there's the part that hit me personally: the suspicious emails claiming to represent Google Ads, saying I owed money. My alarm bells went off, so I didn't click — I went directly to the Google Ads site and logged in there, and found I actually had a positive balance. I didn't owe them anything. The emails were the scam. That's the move, every time: don't click the link in the message, go to the source yourself.
Meta's response, via spokesman Andy Stone, was that the reporting was "a selective view" and that the 10% figure was "rough and overly-inclusive." Fair enough — that's their right to push back. But the documents are the documents, and the follow-up reporting kept coming: Meta's "Trusted Experts" helping run scam ads, billions in revenue from Chinese scam advertisers, and an internal "playbook" for fending off crackdown pressure. And just this month, Rhode Island sued Meta over exactly this — alleging its AI ad tools helped scammers optimize, with scam ads still sitting in the Ad Library.
So what do we actually do about it?
Here's my honest take, and it's the part of the episode I care about most: Meta isn't going to get rid of these ads. The money is too big and the incentives point the wrong way. So the protection has to come from us — from knowing what to look for. A few things worth actually doing:
Don't click the ad. If it looks like a retailer you know, type the address yourself or use their app. Ads can lead to copycat sites that look identical to the real thing.
A bargain-basement price on a brand-name product is the tell. If it's never discounted that deeply anywhere else, it's not a real deal.
Search the seller's name plus "scam" or "complaint" before you buy — in a regular search engine, not on the platform showing you the ad.
Pay by credit card only. Any seller who insists on gift cards, wire transfers, payment apps, or crypto is telling you exactly what they are.
A celebrity pitching an investment is a deepfake until proven otherwise. A voice can be cloned from seconds of audio; a fake video can be made from a single photo.
Urgency is a tactic, not a fact. Countdown timers and "only 3 left" are designed to stop you from thinking.
And one more, straight from the Reuters findings: if you click one scam ad, expect more. The system will feed them to you. Report the ad in the app, and report the scam at ReportFraud.ftc.gov — that's how cases get built.
The bigger question
This goes beyond any single company or platform. When profit becomes the priority, who takes responsibility for the damage? There's a bill in Congress — the SCAM Act — aimed at this, and we'll see where it goes. But I keep coming back to the same question I asked in the episode: do social media companies have a responsibility to prevent scam ads, even when those ads generate revenue? Where should the line be drawn?
I'd genuinely like to hear what you think — drop a comment on the video.
One thing I ran out of time for: flock cameras. I wanted to get into those too, but this episode already went long on one topic — and it's an important one. Maybe that's a second video. Or go look them up yourself in the meantime.
And if you heard something in this episode that sparked an idea — something you want to actually do something about, not just forget by Tuesday — the Headphones-to-Action Workbook is $9 on the Shop tab, and it turns what you hear into a seven-day action plan. That's literally how this podcast started.
That's the episode for this week. Please like and follow — it's the best way to support the show. Share it with someone you think would enjoy it. And comment — I do read them.
I'm Kevin T., and I'll see you next week in my headphones.
Show notes
- Theme: The scam economy — JRE #2567 with Mariana van Zeller; the Reuters investigation into Meta and fraudulent ads; what listeners can actually do to protect themselves
- Centerpiece article: Jeff Horwitz, Reuters, Nov 6, 2025 — "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show" (Pulitzer-winning reporting with Engen Tham)
- Key numbers: ~$16B / 10% of 2024 revenue from scam and banned-goods ads; 15B high-risk scam ads per day; 95% fraud-certainty ban threshold; "penalty bids" below it; CFA $148.2B lost in 2025; FBI IC3 $20.9B reported; FTC $12.5B (2024)
- Fresh this week: Rhode Island sues Meta (Oct 22, 2026) — alleges AI ad tools helped scammers optimize; SCAM Act in Congress
- Protect yourself: don't click the ad — go to the retailer directly; too-good price = tell; search seller + "scam"; credit card only; celebrity investment ad = deepfake until verified; report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov
- Podcast business: Headphones-to-Action Workbook $9 on the Shop tab, instant download
- Full list of podcasts: in the episode description on YouTube
- Closing: like, follow, share, comment — "see you next week in my headphones"