The spike in scams is playing out across the internet — from dating apps and online gaming to cryptocurrency platforms and text messaging. No one likes it. Not the people who use our services. Not advertisers. And certainly not us. The sophisticated criminals behind scams know this, and that’s why they’re constantly trying to find more creative, advanced ways to evade our enforcement systems and defraud people. Every day, we find new ways to stop and take them down.
This week, as we join industry, government, and civil society partners at the Global Anti-Scam Summit in Washington, DC, we’re highlighting our extensive work to combat scams on our platforms and expose the criminals behind them.
Our Comprehensive Approach to Aggressive Scam Reduction
Our multi-layered approach to combating scams includes: using automated, technical defenses to help protect people on our apps; disrupting criminal scam networks; working with partners across the industry and in law enforcement; and raising awareness about ways to spot and prevent scams.
As part of this ongoing work, we continue to deploy a range of product updates to bolster our detection efforts. For example, we’re using the latest advancements in AI to help us detect scams, and we’re always exploring ways to help our users spot suspicious or potentially scammy engagement. In addition to this, we’re expanding our advertiser verification efforts to verify the authenticity of the people and organizations that run ads on our platforms — with particular emphasis on high-risk scam areas like financial investment ads. We’re already seeing signs that it’s working as part of our broader efforts to combat scams, and we’re considering more ways to advance this work.
Our continued development of new product features and tools helps protect individual accounts and legitimate businesses against scams, and we’ve made significant progress in reducing fraud on our apps:
- In the last 15 months, reports about scam ads have declined by more than 50%, and so far in 2025, we’ve removed more than 134 million scam ads.
- In the first half of 2025, our teams detected and disrupted nearly 12 million accounts — across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — associated with the most adversarial and malicious scammers: criminal scam centers.
- We’re using facial recognition technology to stop criminals that abuse images of celebrities and other public figures to lure people into scams. The expansion of facial recognition technology more than doubled the volume of these ads we were able to detect and remove in testing.
Working With Industry Partners and Law Enforcement to Stop Scams
The growth of large-scale criminal enterprises — many of which coerce trafficking victims into cyber scamming — has led to a sharp increase in online scams in recent years. In fact, reported losses from text message scams in the US increased 5X between 2020 and 2024. These criminal groups now operate massive compounds with 300,000 cyber scammers — many of whom are victims themselves having been trafficked, imprisoned, and forced to run scams.
That’s why we’re working closely with our cross-industry partners and law enforcement agencies worldwide to stop them:
- The information we’ve received through these critical cross-industry partnerships has directly led to the disruption of scam networks on our platforms.
- Just this week, we supported the Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force and the FBI in disrupting a criminal operation that’s part of the Tai Chang compound in Myanmar. As a result of information shared with us, we took down 2,000 Facebook accounts targeting victims in the US and abroad. And last month, we coordinated with the FBI and supported Singaporean law enforcement in disrupting an illegal online gambling network that tricked victims into transferring money to anonymous bank accounts.
- In recent years, we’ve filed more than 60 lawsuits against those who abuse our platforms with various schemes, including brand impersonation, account takeovers, and bulk messaging.
- We created the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) program to share information with more than 70 financial institutions around the world and help us identify and stop scams. The information we’ve received through this program alone has directly led to the removal of tens of thousands of violating accounts, profiles, and pages.
- Through the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), a cross-industry signal-sharing platform, we share intelligence about online scam tactics, abusive websites, and emerging threats with our industry partners including Microsoft and Google, as well as regulators.
- We also support the FBI’s Level Up program, which aims to disrupt investment fraud schemes. We use the information we gather through the Level Up program to investigate foreign criminal networks and take action to prevent scammers from targeting people on our apps.
Supporting Bipartisan Legislation
Holding scammers accountable requires a collective effort. Over the years, we’ve worked closely with law enforcement agencies around the world to bring scammers to justice. While legal action is crucial to stopping scammers at the source, we also need a comprehensive approach to public policy that confronts the complex and global scale of scams. That’s why we support legislation that would drive a coordinated, national response and target the transnational criminal organizations behind many scam operations.
Specifically, we support bills that aim to advance our collective efforts to combat scammers and support American victims of fraud and scams including: the National Strategy for Combating Scams Act of 2025, the Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act, the Taskforce for Recognizing and Averting Payment Scams (TRAPS) Act, the Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act, and the STOP Scammers Act. We look forward to working with policymakers on these and other efforts to counter scams and fraud.
Scams don’t just harm individual victims — they undermine trust in our entire advertising ecosystem, which is the very foundation of our business model. Our goal is to ensure that everyone has a positive experience on our platforms — it’s what advertisers want and what keeps people coming back to our apps.
