Profit Over Safety: Meta Earns $3B from Chinese Scam Ads, Executives Tolerated Fraud for Revenue Growth

According to Reuters, Meta has long tolerated a vast volume of scam, illegal gambling, and prohibited‑content advertisements from China to protect its advertising revenue, with internal documents showing senior executives under pressure to grow revenue appeared to look the other way.

In 2024, Meta’s advertising revenue from China surpassed USD 18 billion and accounted for more than 10 percent of its global revenue, with internal estimates indicating roughly 19 percent of that sum—over USD 3 billion—derived from scams, illegal gambling, pornography, or other prohibited content.

The piece explains Meta operates a distinctive “agency model” in China, relying on 11 top‑tier resellers to recruit smaller agencies, creating a firewall that makes direct scrutiny of advertisers at the lowest levels difficult. It also highlights a controversial internal “whitelisting” mechanism where ads purchased through major Chinese agencies receive protection and may remain live pending manual review, often delayed due to staffing shortages.

The article notes that Meta claims to have intercepted 46 million violating advertisements from Chinese partners over the past 18 months, though critics argue this reflects a trade‑off between revenue and safety.