Mark Zuckerberg decided how much of your money his company was willing to let scammers steal.
That number is in a document his own team wrote.
And a California prosecutor just found it.
Meta Facebook Scam Ads Generated $7 Billion a Year in Internal Documents
Internal Meta documents – leaked to Reuters and now cited in a Santa Clara County lawsuit – show the company ran as many as 15 billion fraudulent ads every single day on Facebook and Instagram.
The documents go further: Meta's own safety staff calculated the company was "involved in one third of all successful Internet scams in the U.S."
Meta kept a revenue "guardrail" capping what its fraud prevention team was allowed to spend on enforcement – approximately $135 million for the first half of 2025 alone, out of $90 billion the company generated in that period.
Anything beyond that cost was not worth it to them.
A separate internal presentation projected total fraud-related advertising revenue at $16 billion for 2024. Meta's algorithms didn't just allow the scams – they targeted users who had already clicked on fraudulent content, steering more scam ads toward people already proven susceptible to them.
Meta's response? They removed 159 million scam ads last year. They want credit for that.
They ran 15 billion a day.
Facebook Scam Ads Targeting Seniors Used Fake Trump and Steve Harvey Videos
The lawsuits are not abstract policy disputes.
Scammers ran fake videos of Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Harvey on Facebook – promising seniors free government cash, grocery cards, and Medicare benefits.
30 major scam advertiser accounts that generated 215 million ad impressions over the past year on Facebook alone. Seventy-three percent of those impressions hit users over 65.
One account called Golden Help For All accumulated 1,335 policy violations and kept advertising.
When researchers found 86 identical scam ads running simultaneously, Meta removed 48 of them and left 38 running.
Marissa Garcia, who cares for her 79-year-old grandmother in Las Vegas, watched her grandmother nearly hand her Medicare number to a scammer after seeing one of these ads. Her grandmother's reasoning was straightforward: "If this was a scam, why would it be on Facebook?"
That trust is what Mark Zuckerberg monetized.
Meta Lawsuit Reveals How Zuckerberg Capped Fraud Prevention to Protect Revenue
This is not the first time Facebook promised to clean up and didn't.
In 2019, the FTC hit Meta with a record-breaking $5 billion penalty for violating a 2012 consent order on consumer privacy – a case built on the same pattern: internal documents showing the company knew about the problem, public statements claiming it was being addressed, and years of doing nothing that actually fixed it.
That $5 billion penalty came and went. Meta brought in over $200 billion in revenue in 2025.
Santa Clara County's lawsuit is now the first of its kind filed by a local civil prosecutor anywhere in the nation. Washington State and the U.S. Virgin Islands have filed related actions. The Consumer Federation of America launched a parallel class action in Washington, D.C.
What none of these cases can do on their own is what Congress could.
Meta admitted in writing that it set a cap on how much fraud prevention it was willing to fund. It admitted its platforms were responsible for a third of all successful U.S. internet scams. It profited from algorithms that found the most vulnerable Americans and pointed scammers directly at them.
Jim Jordan has the House Judiciary Committee. James Comer runs Oversight. These documents are sitting in a federal courthouse right now.
If Republican leadership wants a clean, documented case of a trillion-dollar corporation systematically looting American seniors – Zuckerberg's team already wrote it up.
Sources:
- Titus Wu, "New lawsuit claims Facebook profits by 'actively' scamming Californians," New York Post, May 12, 2026.
- "Santa Clara County Takes on Meta Scam Ads in Lawsuit," KQED, May 12, 2026.
- "Former Meta integrity chief says new report reveals 'disappointing' ad fraud epidemic at the social-media giant," Fortune, December 15, 2025.
- "Meta Faces Fresh Controversy Over Facebook Scam Ads Exploiting Elderly Americans," Benzinga, May 13, 2026.
- "FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook," Federal Trade Commission, July 24, 2019.
- "Report says Meta lets scam ads target seniors on Facebook, Instagram," Prism News, May 12, 2026.
