Meta is stepping up its fight against the flood of scams plaguing its platforms, announcing Thursday that it's filing lawsuits against several deceptive advertisers in Brazil, China, and Vietnam. The company has also suspended their payment methods, disabled related accounts, and blocked the scam-linked domains to cut off their operations.
In parallel, Meta sent cease-and-desist letters to eight marketing consultants who were openly advertising ways to dodge its ad enforcement rules, things like fake "un-ban" services, account restoration tricks, or renting out access to supposedly clean, trusted accounts to sneak past restrictions.
A big focus here is on celeb-bait scams, where fraudsters misuse (or deepfake) images and voices of famous people to push bogus products or schemes. Meta highlighted three specific cases in its lawsuits:
1. Brazil-based individuals Vitor Lourenço de Souza and Milena Luciani Sanchez, accused of using manipulated celebrity content to hawk fake healthcare products.
2. Brazil-based entities B&B Suplementos e Cosméticos Ltda. (also known as Brites Corp), Brites Academia de Treinamento Ltda., along with Daniel de Brites Macieira Cordeiro and José Victor de Brites Chaves de Araújo, who allegedly used synthetic imagery of a well-known doctor to sell unapproved health products and even offered courses on running similar scams.
3. China-based Shenzhen Yunzheng Technology Co., Ltd., which ran celeb-bait ads targeting users in places like the U.S. and Japan to lure them into fraudulent investment groups.
To counter this kind of abuse, Meta says it's built protections that now shield the images of more than 500,000 celebrities and public figures from repeated exploitation in these schemes.
Separately, the company sued Vietnam-based advertiser Lý Văn Lâm for using cloaking, a sneaky tactic where the site shown to Meta's reviewers looks harmless, but the real version served to users is a scam. In this instance, ads promised steep discounts on big brands (like Longchamp) in exchange for a quick survey. Clickers ended up on fake sites that harvested credit card details for nonexistent purchases, then hit them with recurring unauthorized charges, classic subscription fraud.
This push comes amid mounting evidence of just how widespread the problem is. A recent investigation into Meta's ad revenue from October of 2022 through October of 2023 found that approximately 19% of the $18 billion earned from China was generated by prohibited content, including scams, illegal gambling, and pornography. As a result of this finding, the company is currently reviewing its Badged Partners program after determining that advertising agencies were creating and facilitating the placement of the aforementioned prohibited advertising.
Adding to the pressure on Meta, the Cybersecurity Firm Gen Digital recently analyzed more than 14.5 million advertisements appearing on Meta platforms operating in the EU and UK during a recent 23-day period, with approximately 31% of those ads either directly linking to scams, phishing, or malware. Those fraudulent ads racked up more than 300 million impressions in under a month, with a handful of advertisers (many tied to shared infrastructure in China and Hong Kong) responsible for over half of them, pointing to organized, large-scale operations.
The broader scam ecosystem is grim: combinations of malvertising and "pig butchering" schemes (where victims are groomed via chatbots into fake investments, then hit with "release fees"), router compromises redirecting DNS to push users to malicious sites, malicious push notification networks preying on Android users (heavily in places like India and Indonesia), and networks of fake law firm sites targeting already-victimized people with "recovery" scams.
Law enforcement is responding too. Cambodia has historically served as a base for many of these operations, but this is changing quickly. Authorities have begun cracking down on these operations extensively by closing down their facilities, arresting hundreds of people and deporting thousands of others.
Despite this challenge, Prime Minister Hun Manet recently said that these "black economy" operations have damaged the country's reputation as well as its tourist industry and legitimate businesses. Authorities also reported that they have seen a 50% decrease in scam activity since the beginning of 2026 with the announcement of dozens of new operations globally and increased collaboration between international partners.
The fight against these types of scammers continues to be a significant challenge. Scammers are adapting to new tools and technologies quickly including the use of AI deepfakes, cloaking, bulletproof hosting, etc. However, the legal actions taken by Meta indicate they are prepared to take on some of the largest criminals in order to break the chain of criminal activity and establish legal precedent that hampers scammers' ability to operate successfully. Therefore, the best advice for consumers is; if an advertisement appears to be too good to be real (such as those listing a celebrity or promising instant rewards), then it probably is not worth clicking on.
Source: The Hacker News
