Mendacity & Deception

Driven by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta has chosen profits and greed over American citizens and even our children, creating a broken corporate culture and a Silicon Valley debacle that will likely dwarf the financial damage and ruin inflicted by Enron.  As you may know, Enron perpetrated one of the largest accounting frauds in American history. It culminated in the largest U.S. Bankruptcy (at its time, 2002) and the destruction of Arthur Anderson, one of America’s most venerated accounting firms.

Instead of cryptic Special Purpose Entities (SPEs) employed by Enron, Meta has simply harnessed the power of fraud and dirty revenue to pad its balance sheet. In the process, Zuckerberg and Meta have deliberately misled its users, investors, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and even the Senate Judiciary Committee. One might say that Meta’s path to perdition became fully known with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal involved the surreptitious and unauthorized harvesting and sale of Meta’s personal users’ data by a political consulting firm. The personal data obtained involved over 87 million Facebook users without their informed consent.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) levied an unprecedented 5 billion dollar fine against Meta. Recently, Meta settled a shareholder derivative suit, stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for $190 million dollars. “The shareholders who brought the case claimed  [that the Meta Board of] directors failed to oversee Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who were allowed to run an illegal data-harvesting enterprise.” Sheryl Sanberg was Meta’s former Chief Operating Officer (COO) who has been largely credited with bringing Facebook to profitability. Sanberg left Meta in 2024.

Personal Data Harvesting & Fraud Advertising Revenue

Notwithstanding stringent Terms of Service (TOS) and contractual commitments to protecting and safeguarding its users, Meta has done just the opposite. It is facing fierce scrutiny in multiple countries, including the European Union and Australia. It recently settled a dispute with the Nigerian Data Protection Commission for $32.8 million over alleged data privacy violations. In Zuckerberg’s own testimony, under oath during a recent antitrust case led by the Federal Trade Commission, Zuckerberg stated that Facebook “isn’t really to connect with friends anymore.” In fact, it’s clear that Zuckerberg and Meta have moved on from the [lofty] idealism of the early Internet to the sloppified money-grubbing of whatever it is they have now.

What we have now is a Racketeering Corrupt Influenced Organization (RICO) in bed with scammers, and complicit in swindling its Facebook users in the name of profits at any cost.

 Reuters, one of the largest news agencies in the world,  clearly has connections. Jeff Horwitz, an esteemed  Reuters journalist, recently exposed the intricacies of Meta’s complicity in fraud, and its bustling business (fraud) empire in China.

On December 15, 2025, Jeff Horwitz reported:

“Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta’s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, p*rnography, and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

“The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by Meta teams, including finance, lobbying, engineering, and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta’s efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company’s reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues.

“The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta’s platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. “We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm,” Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations. But, what happened next is appalling. 

“Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.”

The article continues to share that staffers did reduce some fraudulent advertising but, after “follow up” from Mark Zuckerberg, pivoted away from the crackdown.

“The levels [of fraud] that you’re talking about are not defensible. I don’t know how anyone could think this is okay.”  Rob Leathern, a former senior director of product management at Facebook

All of this reporting by Reuters conflicts with Zuckerberg’s representations to Congress. Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the expose, Careless People, noted during opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee in April that: “I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China.”

“Top-Tier” China Ad Agencies

According to Reuters, there are eleven go-to ad agency partners in China. Moreover, “these “top-tier” agencies have given rise to “an entire industry of “ad optimization specialists” that exploit weaknesses in Meta’s enforcement systems, and create ads for scams and banned goods. “The shady advertising campaigns these specialists managed were often funded by ‘informal’ sources, including loan sharks.”

Reuters conducted an experiment that demonstrates how easily it was able to place scam ads on Facebook.  Not only did Reuters receive the assistance of “Badged Partners,” associated with Meta, but Meta’s own AI tools also helped enhance the deceptive advertising – optimization if you will. All of this deception is in absolute contravention of existing Meta policies.  Meta’s “trusted partners” receive a mulligan. The ads generated through those trusted partners were not subject to immediate takedown or remedial action.

 You can access the most recent coverage of Meta’s complicity in criminal fraud here:

Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue

Meta’s “Trusted Experts” helped me run scam ads on Facebook and Instagram

Consistently, Meta has effectively demonstrated that it will not protect its users’ data and privacy unless compelled to do so. And, it is more than willing to disregard its Terms of Service and contractual commitment to protect is users from fraud. The  unprecedented FTC fine, financial settlements, and shareholder derivative action are meaningless – without effect – merely a cost of doing business.  The profits – massive largesse in Meta’s burgeoning coffers – far outweigh these nuisances. Meta and Zuckerberg appear to treat these impositions as little more than peccadilloes encountered on their unending quest  for power and money.

Sextortion, outright theft from American (and other citizens), suicides (including children!), and so much more, just so Meta can earn a few billion extra dollars…

Now that our federal government is investigating (and will likely be prosecuting) Meta. When will some of Meta’s employees face prison time? It can’t be soon enough!

Do you think you’re the victim of a scam? Contact James M. Walsh, Esq. for help.

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JAMES M. WALSH, ESQ. is a former Navy JAGC officer and a recipient of the American Bar Association’s coveted LAMP Award for excellence in military legal assistance practice. A rolling stone, J.M. has globetrotted most of his adult life. After the military, J.M. pursued commercial real estate development, leasing, and asset management. He resides in Catania, Sicily. He spent almost twenty years in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Luzerne, Erie & Lackawanna Counties. His handiwork as an editor and author is interspersed throughout this novel. Leo A. Murray fondly refers to J.M. as his collaborative, literary ‘Coach’ or ‘Lieutenant.’ Agnes claims that he has gypsy in his heart and rabbit in his feet.

James’ thriller, Maximum Impact, written with co-author Leo Murray, was published by Abuzz Press.

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