Meta filed lawsuits on Thursday against advertisers in Brazil, China, and Vietnam over coordinated scam campaigns on its platforms, while simultaneously suspending their payment methods, disabling related accounts, and blocking website domains used to facilitate the fraud.
The company also issued cease and desist letters to eight marketing consultants who advertised services to bypass Meta’s ad policy enforcement systems. Those services included fake account restoration schemes, so-called “un-ban” services, and renting access to trusted accounts to help clients evade platform controls.
Celeb-Bait and Cloaking Tactics
At least three advertisers, two based in Brazil and one in China, ran celeb-bait scams. These operations misuse the images of recognizable public figures to push fraudulent ads that funnel users to scam websites designed to harvest personal data or solicit money for fake investment platforms.
Meta said it has built protections specifically for high-profile targets. “This program currently protects the images of more than 500,000 celebrities and public figures around the world,” the company stated.
A Vietnam-based advertiser, Lý Văn Lâm, was sued separately for using cloaking, a technique that shows ad reviewers a benign version of a website while serving malicious content to actual users. The advertiser used scam ads to promote discounted goods from well-known brands, directing users to fake checkout pages where credit card details were collected. Items were never delivered, and victims were enrolled in unauthorized recurring charges through subscription fraud.
Scale of the Problem
The legal actions arrive against a backdrop of mounting evidence that scam advertising on Meta’s platforms operates at industrial scale. A Reuters investigation earlier this year found that 19% of Meta’s $18 billion in ad sales in China in 2024 came from ads promoting scams, illegal gambling, pornography, and other banned content. That report also exposed agencies facilitating banned advertisements, prompting Meta to place its Badged Partners program under review.
More Read
Separately, Gen Digital analyzed 14.5 million ads running on Meta platforms across the E.U. and U.K. over a 23-day period and found that nearly one in three, approximately 30.99%, pointed to a scam, phishing, or malware link. “In total, scam ads generated more than 300 million impressions in less than a month,” the cybersecurity firm reported. Just 10 advertisers accounted for over 56% of all observed scam ads, with payment and infrastructure trails pointing back to China and Hong Kong.
Law Enforcement and Regional Crackdowns
The broader scam economy, increasingly fueled by pig butchering-as-a-service operations, has drawn law enforcement responses across Southeast Asia. Cambodia’s government said police launched 48 operations in the first nine months of 2025, arresting 168 people and deporting 2,722 others. Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith said those efforts have cut scam activity in half since the start of this year.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet acknowledged that scam centers operating inside Cambodia are damaging the country’s international reputation and undermining its economy.
Meta’s lawsuits represent one layer of a multi-front response to fraud that regulators, governments, and cybersecurity researchers are now tracking with increasing urgency.
Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
