Meta has knowingly taken steps and adopted policies that allow scam advertising to spread, and in 2024 Meta anticipated that more than 10 percent of its earnings would come from scam advertisements, illegal gambling, and the sale of prohibited goods on its platforms, according to a lawsuit.
Filed by the Consumer Federation of America, or CFA, on behalf of itself and a proposed class of D.C. Facebook users, the lawsuit alleges Meta misleads D.C. users about the steps it claims to be taking to fight fraud on its platform. While promising that it’s meaningfully fighting scams and removing scam content from its platform, Meta has actually adopted policies and practices that it knows allow scam advertisements to proliferate on its platforms while simultaneously profiting off those ads at its users’ expense.
Under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, the CFA seeks to recover damages, illegal profits, and injunctive relief for D.C. consumers and to prevent Meta from benefiting from its violations of D.C. law.
“As Americans lose more and more money to online scams, Meta has consistently chosen to prioritize profit over the safety of their users,” Ben Winters, director of AI and data privacy, said in a statement. “Congress has failed to hold Meta accountable, the Trump Administration has become a Big Tech lobbying firm, and State AGs are stretched thin.”
Rather than prohibiting advertisers the company itself determined as higher risk, Meta chose to charge these advertisers a higher rate, increasing their profits by allowing higher-risk advertisers access to their users, the lawsuit alleges. Meta has misled its users, including those in D.C., about the risks they face every time they log onto one of Meta’s platforms, including Facebook.
The CFA recently published “The Scam Economy: The True Cost of Online Scams and Crimes in America,” a report that uses scam reporting statistics from government and third party sources as well as estimates of underreporting to show that Americans lose more than $119 billion per year to online scams. Residents of D.C. have been especially devastated, losing an estimated $2.1 billion each year to scams, the highest per capita figure in the country.
Last year, the CFA published “Scamplified,” a report describing and classifying the different ways emerging technologies are used to produce scams and fraud at scale.
