Rhode Island filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms on Thursday, accusing the company of tolerating widespread scam advertising on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Reuters.
The lawsuit was filed by Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha in Providence Superior Court. It accuses Meta of unlawfully profiting from and participating in the creation of billions of dollars’ worth of scam advertising, despite telling users it is working to protect them.
The lawsuit seeks civil monetary penalties for each alleged violation of Rhode Island state law, restitution for consumers, the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and a court order requiring Meta to address, rather than profit from, scam ads that appear on its platforms.
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“As alleged, Meta knowingly exposed vulnerable users to fraud and scams, and made enormous profits in doing so. When companies, big or small, take advantage of Rhode Island consumers, this office will do everything within our authority to hold them to account,” Neronha said in a press release.
The lawsuit cites previous Reuters reporting based on internal Meta documents detailing the scale of fraudulent advertising on the company’s platforms. The documents also reportedly show Meta calculated that revenue from high-risk scam ads exceeded the fines it expected to pay.
According to the documents cited in the reporting, Meta displays around 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day. The company also earned roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue from prohibited marketing, including fraudulent e-commerce and questionable health products.
The lawsuit further alleges that Meta’s AI ad-creation tools actively helped scammers develop fraudulent marketing campaigns. It also claims Meta often charged advertisers additional fees as a penalty instead of consistently blocking advertisers its automated detection systems flagged as potentially fraudulent.
“Meta knowingly helped create and optimize these ads to ensure that they were as effective as possible and then lied about them, misrepresenting to the public its commitment to prevent fraud on its platforms,” the complaint stated.
Meta has previously disputed Reuters’ reporting. “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to the reporting last year, calling it “a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.”
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Although Meta has said it made progress in combating scams following the Reuters report, Rhode Island alleges that fraudulent ads remain widespread and easy to find in Meta’s ad library, a database of advertisements running on the company’s platforms.
“The ad below, for example, promised to reverse Alzheimer’s in 45 days,” Rhode Island’s complaint stated, referring to one set of scam ads. “There were more than 2,000 versions of this ad active in the Meta Ad library.”
Nileena Sunil is a Reporter for the American Bazaar. A postgraduate in English Literature from Christ University, Bengaluru, she has previously worked as an instructional designer and a copywriter before switching fields.
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