Scam ads flood social media. These ex-meta employees have a plan
When the Dutch billionaire TV producer John DeMole sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to prevent fraudsters from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Latern to Amsterdam to meet with DeMole’s team and speak to the media.
“The people doing this kind of advertising are persistent, well-funded, and constantly developing their own deceptive tactics to bypass our systems,” Latern told Reuters at the time.
During his four years at the company now known as Meta, Latern was in many ways the public face of his efforts to combat fraudulent advertising. He led the business integrity unit tasked with preventing fraudsters and other bad actors from abusing Meta’s advertising products. He regularly spoke to the media about fraudulent advertising. Leathern also oversaw transparency efforts such as the Meta Ad Library, the industry’s first free, searchable digital ad repository, and the launch of identity verification for political advertisers.
But since leaving Meta at the end of 2020, Leathern has seen criminals use deepfakes and use artificial intelligence to craft convincing scam ads. He said he was concerned that the big platforms couldn’t invest in the teams and technology at the rate needed to fight such abusive ads.
“Technology and progress have been stagnant for the last five years,” Latern said in an interview. I also feel like we don’t really know how bad it has gotten or what the current situation is. We have no objective ways of knowing.”
Leathern has teamed up with Rob Goldman, former VP of Meta Ads, to launch CollectiveMetrics.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing more transparency to digital advertising to combat deceptive advertising. The goal is to use data and analytics to measure things like the prevalence of online ad fraud and lift the veil on opaque ad systems that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Meta.
Their efforts come at a time when losses due to fraud have increased dramatically around the world. The Global Anti-Fraud Alliance, an organization that researches fraud trends and includes leaders from Meta, Google and other platforms on its advisory board, estimates that victims lost at least $1 trillion last year. The Global State of Fraud 2025 report found that 23 percent of people have lost money due to fraud.
Many victims don’t report fraud because they feel embarrassed or don’t know who to tell, the report said. Of those who reported fraud, more than a third said “no action was taken by the platform after reporting it.”
