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Meta's $16 Billion Scam Problem—And What It Reveals About How "Normal" Advertisers Actually Get Priced
Meta projected that about 10% of its 2024 revenue—roughly $16 billion—came from ads promoting scams and banned goods, including fraudulent e-commerce schemes, illegal online casinos, and prohibited medical products. In this article, we'll reveal how Meta monetizes risk instead of eliminating it.
Josh Scoreify
December 11, 2025
In early November, Reuters1 published internal Meta documents that finally put a dollar figure on something serious advertisers have suspected for years.
Meta projected that about 10% of its 2024 revenue—roughly $16 billion—came from ads promoting scams and banned goods, including fraudulent e-commerce schemes, illegal online casinos, and prohibited medical products.2
Meta showed users an estimated 15 billion "higher risk" scam ads on average each day.3
For anyone who's been following what we've written about hidden restrictions and how Meta quietly throttles legitimate advertisers—this is the first time we've seen internal documentation confirming exactly how Meta monetizes risk instead of eliminating it.
Risky Advertisers Don't Get Banned. They Get Taxed.
Here's the part that should change how you think about your own performance.
According to the documents, Meta bans advertisers only when its automated systems are 95% certain that an account is committing fraud.4
For everyone below that threshold—accounts that look risky but aren't definitively scams—Meta does something different.
Meta has a "penalty bids" system where suspicious advertisers have to pay more to win the auctions that place ads in your feed.5
The logic is simple:
Clear scam → potentially blocked
Suspected risk → charged more to stay in the auction
From Meta's perspective, banning removes spend entirely. Taxing risky advertisers preserves revenue while creating friction.
From a legitimate advertiser's perspective, it's a problem—because those automated systems aren't perfect. And if your assets look too similar to the accounts Meta is penalizing, you get grouped into the same bucket without knowing it.
The Shift From Bans to Silent Penalties
If you've been running ads long enough to remember when Meta advertising was still "Facebook Ads," you probably remember the ban waves.
Back then, accounts got disabled constantly. Pages vanished overnight. Business Managers were nuked without warning. You were either live or you were gone.
Today, outright bans are rarer. Most advertisers who've been in the game for a few years still have their original assets.
But here's what most people miss: Meta didn't stop enforcing. It just stopped telling you.
Instead of banning accounts that trigger concern, Meta now applies invisible restrictions that accumulate over time. Every policy violation you appealed and won? Still on your record. Every spike in refunds during a bad product run? Logged. Every time your Page got flagged years ago? That history follows you.
Your assets survived. The trust didn't.
What Makes You "Look Risky" to Meta
Meta's automated systems don't distinguish between actual fraud and legitimate businesses that happen to share surface-level signals with bad actors.
Those signals can include:
High refund rates or chargebacks
Negative feedback from customers
Policy violations—even ones you successfully appealed
Assets with past restrictions or bad history
Erratic spending patterns
Customer complaints about shipping, product quality, or support
The more your advertising footprint resembles the accounts Meta is taxing, the more likely you are to pay the same premium—whether you're actually a bad actor or not.
This shows up as rising CPMs with no obvious cause, campaigns that won't scale no matter what you try, ad reviews that take longer or reject for vague reasons, and performance that degrades gradually over time.
Most advertisers assume it's competition or algorithm changes. These documents suggest it might be reputation-based pricing working against you.
What You Can Do About It
You can't change Meta's incentive structure. But you can understand where your assets stand and fix the signals working against you.
That starts with visibility—knowing your actual trust tier, identifying any hidden restrictions on your Business Manager, ad accounts, and Pages, and understanding which factors are dragging down your performance.
We've written extensively about HiVA tiers, ACE warnings, and how feedback scores now impact the auction. If you're experiencing the symptoms described above, those are good places to start.
The Takeaway
The Reuters leak confirms what we've been documenting for years: Meta's ad ecosystem isn't a neutral marketplace. Trust and risk are monetized. The penalty for looking like a risky advertiser often isn't a clean ban—it's higher costs and worse delivery without explanation.
If you've been experiencing "performance problems" that don't respond to creative changes, budget adjustments, or audience tweaks—consider that the platform may not trust you very much. And you're paying for that doubt in every auction.
Scoreify exists to help you see what's actually happening inside your Meta assets, fix the restrictions working against you, and give your brand the best possible chance of being treated—and priced—like one of the good ones.
Book a discovery call to see what's really going on in your account.
