What Money Cannot Measure: The Human Cost of Meta’s Choices

There is a version of this story that stays in the numbers. Five hundred million dollars lost. Fifteen billion scam ads served daily. Eight fraud strikes before a small advertiser gets banned. Eighteen billion dollars in Chinese ad revenue protected at all costs. Those numbers are real and they are damning. But numbers do not retire on the first day their life savings disappear. Numbers do not lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering how they will afford care for a spouse with dementia.

Anthony Irving worked for more than fifty years. More than half a century of labor, discipline, and deferred gratification, building something to leave behind for his grandchildren. He saw an ad on Facebook. The ad was not some obvious trap dressed in blinking lights. It looked real because Meta’s AI made it look real. It featured a credible face, a credible firm, a credible pitch. Meta’s tools generated the image variations, wrote the supporting text, and delivered the ad directly to Irving based on proprietary data showing he was likely to engage with investment content. Irving joined the WhatsApp group. He trusted the process. He bought shares of JYD for himself and for his grandchildren. The dump happened on April 2, 2025. That was also the first day of his retirement. He lost more than $339,000.

A newly divorced mother of three was served one of these ads while she was in the middle of rebuilding her entire life after 27 years of marriage ended. She had spent 20 years as a stay-at-home parent. She was trying to re-enter the workforce at an age when the workforce does not always welcome you back. She saw what looked like a legitimate investment training program. She saw it because Meta’s targeting system identified her as someone in a moment of financial vulnerability and financial aspiration simultaneously. She joined. She invested. She lost. The complaint documents that she now suffers from panic attacks and insomnia. When she does sleep, she wakes into what she describes as overwhelming hopelessness. She reports feeling ashamed and humiliated, not by her own choices, but by the deception that was engineered around her.

A 70-year-old man is the sole caretaker for his wife of 48 years, who has dementia. He built his savings over a 40-year career as a military combat veteran and business professional. The JYD Scheme depleted those assets. The complaint describes him as previously social and active. He is now withdrawn, cynical, and short-tempered. He does not know how he will provide the care his wife needs. The financial loss and the emotional loss have become a single, inseparable weight.

Parents who had saved for their children’s college educations are in this group. One describes a “suffocating” guilt, the specific terror of having inadvertently stolen a future from your own children. Members of the JYD Victim Group, more than 100 people in total, report clinical depression, anxiety disorders, insomnia, and strained personal relationships. Some reported thoughts of self-harm. Some reported thoughts of suicide.

Meta collected advertising revenue from every single one of the ads that put these people in these rooms. In its most recent fiscal year, Meta made $160.6 billion from advertising. It made those ads better than the scammers could have made them on their own. It knew the celebrity endorsements were fake because its own customer records would have shown no affiliation between the ad buyers and the famous people pictured. It ran the ads anyway, then charged scammers a higher rate for the privilege of continuing to run them once its systems flagged them as likely fraud. The complaint describes this as essentially a premium fraud service: if Meta suspects you are a scammer, it does not stop you. It charges you more. And it keeps the money.

What the Documents Actually Say

The following are direct quotations from the class action complaint, filed February 5, 2026, and from the internal Meta documents and third-party investigations the complaint cites. Nothing below has been paraphrased.

“Meta’s core business is selling its advertising services, which include generating online advertisements and targeting them to Facebook and Instagram users based on proprietary data that Meta collects regarding each user’s interests and activities both within the Facebook and Instagram platforms and on devices linked to the user’s social media accounts.”

Complaint, Para. 2

“Meta’s advertising tools enabled the scammers to target victims with hundreds of advertisements for supposed investment clubs associated with celebrities, well-known investors, and advisory firms, none of which were Meta ad customers.”

Complaint, Para. 10

“Meta’s internal ad review system applies a lenient standard, banning advertisers only if Meta’s automated tools determine with at least 95% certainty that they are committing fraud. Further, a small advertiser will not be removed until it has been flagged for promoting financial fraud at least eight times, while so-called ‘High Value Accounts’ — i.e., those that generate more ad revenue for Meta — can accumulate more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down.”

Reuters, Nov. 6, 2025, citing internal Meta documents

“The company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion ‘higher risk’ scam advertisements — those that show clear signs of being fraudulent — every day.”

Reuters, Nov. 6, 2025, citing internal Meta documents from December 2024

“We’re not told in the exact words, but [the idea is to] look the other way. It’s ‘Oh, that’s just China being China. It is what it is. We want China revenue.'”

Internal Meta source, cited in BuzzFeed News (Dec. 10, 2020), referenced in Complaint Para. 53

“Meta took steps to make problematic content ‘not findable’ by ‘regulators, investors and journalists’ in response to scrutiny from Japanese regulators. These steps included deleting ads featuring particular celebrities and keywords Meta knew were a focus for Japanese regulators, in order to reduce the ‘prevalence perception’ of scam ads resulting from searches of the Ad Library. Meta then added this tactic to its ‘general global playbook’ to combat regulatory scrutiny in other markets, including the United States.”

Reuters, Dec. 31, 2025, citing internal Meta documents, referenced in Complaint Para. 55

“Meta does not allow: Content that attempts to scam or defraud users and/or businesses by means of… investment opportunities where returns on investment are guaranteed or risk-free [or] investment opportunities where the opportunity is of a ‘get-rich-quick’ nature and/or claims that a small investment can be turned into a large amount.”

Meta Community Standards, Fraud, Scams, and Deceptive Practices (Q1 2025, Exhibit B to Complaint)

“The ease with which these scams can be initiated and disseminated on [Meta’s] platforms, targeting our most vulnerable population, is alarming… If Meta is unable to implement a more effective process, then it should just stop running investment advertisements as a category.”

Letter from 40+ State Attorneys General to Meta Chief Legal Officer, June 5, 2025, cited in Complaint Para. 49

Step by Step: How Meta’s AI Moved Money from Retirees to Criminals

The JYD Scheme was not a simple scam. It was an engineered operation with distinct phases, each of which required Meta’s participation to function. Here is what actually happened.

• Chinese scammers acquired 50 million shares of JYD (Jayud Global Logistics Ltd., a Chinese company listed on NASDAQ) at deeply discounted prices through a non-bona fide offering in December 2024. These shares had to be unloaded at inflated prices to generate profit. The scheme required outside buyers to purchase at the inflated price.
• The scammers used Meta’s Ads Manager, specifically the Advantage+ Creative, Dynamic Creative, and Flexible Format tools, to create investment-club ads. These tools generated hundreds of ad variations. Meta’s AI selected imagery, wrote supporting copy, chose platforms (Facebook vs. Instagram), and determined how each ad would appear in each user’s feed. The scammers provided seeds; Meta’s system built the finished product.
• The ads impersonated real, named financial professionals including Kevin O’Leary (“Mr. Wonderful”), Jim Cramer, Bill Ackman, Ray Dalio, Dave Ramsey, Savita Subramanian (Bank of America Merrill Lynch), Karen Finerman (Metropolitan Capital Advisors/CNBC Fast Money), Tom Lee (FundStrat Global Advisors), and Colin Moran (Abdiel Capital Advisors). None of these people had any relationship with the ad buyers. Meta’s records would have confirmed this.
• Meta’s targeting system directed these ads to users whose behavior indicated an interest in investing. The complaint documents that victims reported researching investment strategies on the same devices linked to their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the weeks before they were targeted, discussing investments near their devices, and using those devices to access brokerage accounts. Meta’s proprietary surveillance data made this targeting possible.
• One confirmed Meta-generated ad, created through Advantage+, asked whether users were “interested in making 10% weekly returns,” implying a 14,000% annualized rate, directly violating Meta’s own stated prohibition against “get-rich-quick” investment ads. Another Meta-generated ad read: “Tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Break the cycle and start earning a steady weekly income with our proven system.” Meta’s AI wrote that text.
• Users who clicked were automatically added to, or linked to, private WhatsApp groups. Meta operates WhatsApp as part of its platform ecosystem. Inside these groups, scammers posed as representatives of the impersonated firms, created dozens of fake “satisfied member” accounts to simulate a track record, and built weeks of trust through friendly communication and early small recommendations.
• Beginning March 21, 2025, and intensifying March 25–27, the scammers recommended JYD as a “VIP institutional stock” pick. They claimed JYD was negotiating a strategic partnership with U.S. logistics company Matson, Inc. (MATX) that would produce 36% profit growth. They pressured victims to buy immediately, warning that waiting even a few days would cause them to miss the run-up. They pressured victims to liquidate other investments, move cash between accounts, and take out loans.
• Because hundreds or thousands of victims across hundreds of WhatsApp groups were buying simultaneously, JYD’s price more than doubled in approximately two weeks, closing at $7.97 per share on April 1, 2025. The rising price falsely validated the scammers’ predictions, encouraging further purchases.
• On the evening of April 1, 2025, the scammers and their co-conspirators began selling their 50 million shares in after-hours trading. Stop-loss orders failed to execute because the sell-off occurred after market hours and because price gaps were so sudden and liquidity so thin that the orders could not be filled. The stock simply fell through the stop-loss triggers.
• By the time markets opened on April 2, JYD was already down 79%. By end of day, it had lost more than 95% of its value, trading as low as $0.35 per share. Approximately 45.8 million shares had been sold, nearly the entire 50-million-share position acquired in December 2024.

Meta Knew and Chose Revenue Over Its Users

The complaint documents a pattern of knowledge, internal deliberation, and deliberate inaction that stretches back at least to January 2018. This is not a case of inadequate technology or insufficient staffing. It is a case of calculated choices.

• Meta has been aware of investment scam ads featuring celebrity likenesses since at least January 2018, based on evidence introduced in the Australian court case filed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in March 2022. British personal finance expert Martin Lewis sued Meta in April 2018 after his name and likeness were used in get-rich-quick ads on Facebook.
• An internal Meta analysis from 2022, reported by The Wall Street Journal, found that 70% of newly active advertisers on Meta’s platforms were promoting scams, illicit goods, or “low quality” products. Meta had this data internally. It did not overhaul its policies.
• In October 2020, the FTC reported that 94% of complaints about online shopping fraud on social media identified Facebook or Instagram as the source. Meta had access to FTC public data and press releases.
• Nearly 30% of advertisements placed by China-based advertisers, estimated to account for $2.6 billion in 2020 ad sales alone, violated at least one of Facebook’s own ad policies, according to an internal Meta study reported by BuzzFeed News.
• Chinese ad revenue grew from 6.4% of total revenue in 2021 to 11.2% in 2024, reaching $18.35 billion. As this revenue grew, Meta’s willingness to police Chinese-advertiser fraud decreased proportionally. The internal quote documented in the complaint, “We want China revenue,” reflects this calculation explicitly.
• In late 2024, Zuckerberg personally reviewed a China-focused anti-scam team and a freeze on new Chinese ad agency access to Meta platforms. Following his feedback, Meta shut the team down and lifted the freeze. Scam ads from China surged immediately afterward.
• Meta’s internal ad review system, as of late 2024, required 95% certainty of fraud before banning an advertiser. High-value accounts received more than 500 fraud strikes before action. The system also allowed flagged scammers to remain active but charged them higher rates, effectively monetizing the detection of fraud rather than stopping it.
• Instead of fixing its Ad Library to show the true scale of scam advertising, Meta manipulated it to hide scam ads from regulatory searches, then codified this into a global anti-regulatory playbook. Taiwan’s government mandated real advertiser verification and saw investment scam ads fall 96% and identity impersonation scams fall 94%. Meta chose not to apply similar verification to investment ads globally.

Who Pays When Meta Profits from Fraud

Public Health

The psychological damage documented in this case is not anecdotal. It is a measurable public health outcome of Meta’s business decisions.

• Members of the JYD Victim Group report experiencing clinical depression and anxiety disorders as a direct result of the scheme. These are not short-term emotional responses; they are conditions that require medical treatment and affect daily functioning.
• Documented insomnia among victims has cascading health consequences, including immune suppression, cardiovascular stress, and cognitive impairment. The complaint records that some victims, when they do sleep, wake immediately into states of overwhelming psychological distress.
• Some members of the JYD Victim Group reported thoughts of self-harm and suicide. The financial destruction of a person’s retirement savings, college funds, or household safety net is a recognized precipitating factor in suicide risk, and the complaint explicitly documents this outcome among the victim population.
• Victims report strained or damaged personal relationships as a direct consequence of the losses. Marriages, family dynamics, and social networks are measurably harmed when financial catastrophe is combined with shame, humiliation, and psychological breakdown.
• The sole caretaker for a spouse with dementia now faces decisions about medical care he cannot afford, with no financial cushion remaining. The scheme transferred the cost of his wife’s dementia care from his personal assets to an uncertain future that may require public assistance.
• A newly divorced mother re-entering the workforce now does so in a worse position than before the scam, with destroyed savings and documented panic attacks. Her ability to provide stable housing and resources for three children has been materially set back.

Economic Inequality

Scam ads do not target the wealthy. They target people searching for a way up, and Meta’s targeting system is optimized to find them.

• Meta’s Advantage+ targeting system, by the complaint’s own description, directed these ads to users whose behavior suggested financial aspiration combined with financial vulnerability: people researching investing on their devices, discussing investments near their phones, accessing brokerage accounts. These behavioral signals identify people who want to build wealth but may lack experience, making them ideal targets for fake investment clubs.
• The complaint documents that victims were pressured to liquidate existing investments, move cash between accounts, and take out loans to fund their JYD purchases. The scheme specifically targeted and destroyed the accumulated savings of people in or approaching retirement, a stage of life where losses cannot be recovered through future earnings.
• The JYD Victim Group alone, more than 100 documented victims, lost over $9 million collectively. The estimated class-wide losses exceed $500 million. These funds flowed upward: from ordinary investors to a criminal network in China, with Meta collecting its advertising fees from both the scam ads and, at higher rates, from the flagged accounts it chose not to remove.
• Meta’s $160.6 billion in 2024 advertising revenue, of which more than $18 billion came from China, was partly funded by fees collected from scam advertisers. The victims’ losses are, in a structural sense, a transfer of wealth from ordinary users to Meta’s revenue line and to criminal networks, enabled by Meta’s deliberate policy choices.
• Taiwan mandated advertiser verification and saw investment scam rates drop 96%. The technology to prevent this harm exists. Meta chose not to implement it for investment ads in order to protect revenue. The cost of that choice is borne entirely by victims.
• More than 40 State Attorneys General documented that these scams disproportionately target “our most vulnerable population.” Financial exploitation of older adults, people in financial transitions, and people with limited investment experience is a documented inequality driver, and Meta’s platforms are identified by 94% of FTC social media fraud complaints as the primary vector.

Translating the Numbers into What They Mean

What Now: Where to Push, Who to Contact, and What to Demand

This is an active federal class action. The case is in its earliest stages. What happens next depends on whether ordinary people, regulators, and lawmakers treat this as an isolated incident or as evidence of a structural failure in how the world’s largest social media company operates.

Key Defendants and Leadership

• Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer, Meta Platforms, Inc. The complaint directly documents his personal decision to shut down the China anti-scam team and lift the Chinese ad agency freeze in late 2024 in the name of revenue growth.
• Jennifer Gillian Newstead, Chief Legal Officer, Meta Platforms, Inc. She was the named recipient of the June 2025 letter from 40+ State Attorneys General demanding Meta improve its investment scam enforcement.
• Morris Kandinov LLP, plaintiff class counsel. Contact: leo@moka.law, aaron@moka.law, andrew@moka.law, william@moka.law. If you were targeted by similar investment ads on Facebook or Instagram and lost money, particularly involving JYD or other Chinese penny stocks listed on NASDAQ, you may be a class member.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies That Can Act

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Already has documented data showing 94% of social media shopping fraud complaints name Facebook or Instagram. The FTC has enforcement authority over unfair and deceptive trade practices and has previously reported on Meta’s scam ad problem. File a consumer fraud report at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): The JYD pump-and-dump scheme involves securities fraud on a NASDAQ-listed stock. Capital Wealth Planning already filed with the SEC in June 2024 when its CEO was impersonated. File a securities fraud tip at sec.gov/tcr.
• Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA): FINRA issued a formal investor alert in January 2024 about the surge in social media investment group scams. FINRA Rule 2210 prohibits the kinds of return projections featured in these ads. Report investment fraud to FINRA at finra.org/investors/have-problem.
• Your State Attorney General: 40+ State AGs have already signed a letter demanding Meta act. If your state AG was a signatory, contact their office and document your losses. If they were not a signatory, contact them and ask why. The National Association of Attorneys General letter is publicly available at naag.org.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): The JYD scheme involves an organized criminal network operating out of China. File a complaint at ic3.gov. The more reports on file, the more viable a federal criminal investigation becomes.
• Congress: The Senate Commerce Committee and Judiciary Committee are the same committees before which Zuckerberg testified in 2018, where he explained Meta’s ad targeting model. They have jurisdiction to compel testimony and legislate mandatory advertiser verification for investment ads, similar to what Meta already requires for political ads.

Grassroots and Mutual Aid Actions

• If you or someone you know lost money in the JYD Scheme or a similar Meta-platform investment scam, document everything: screenshots of the ads, records of any WhatsApp communications, dates, and dollar amounts. This documentation is the foundation of both individual claims and class membership verification.
• Share this investigation with older family members who use Facebook or Instagram. The complaint documents that Meta’s AI specifically targets users who demonstrate interest in investing. People approaching or in retirement are a primary demographic for these ads. Warn them directly, by name, with specific examples of the celebrity faces used (O’Leary, Cramer, Ackman, Dalio, Ramsey).
• Organize with neighbors and community groups to collectively report scam investment ads as soon as they appear. The complaint documents that Meta’s reporting system was “ineffective,” but mass coordinated reporting creates a documented record that strengthens future regulatory and legal action.
• Support local and state legislation requiring social media platforms to verify the identity of investment ad purchasers before allowing ads to run, the same standard Taiwan mandated that produced a 96% reduction in scam investment ads. Contact your state legislator and ask them to introduce equivalent legislation.
• If you work in finance, investment advisory, or media, and you find your face, name, or firm has been used in a Meta ad without your authorization, contact law enforcement, the SEC, and the plaintiff class counsel in this case. The complaint documents that Meta has ignored repeated outreach from impersonated firms. Your documented complaint strengthens the legal record.