Santa Clara County Takes on Meta Scam Ads in Lawsuit

Santa Clara County is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging the company is enabling and profiting from billions of scam advertisements circulating on its sites.

The civil lawsuit, filed Monday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, claims Menlo Park-based Meta’s social media platforms carry around 15 billion scam ads daily, hurting seniors, families and small businesses, among its 3.5 billion users.

County officials said the suit, filed on behalf of all California residents, is the first of its kind to be brought in the state and the first such action by any local civil prosecutor in the nation.

County Counsel Tony LoPresti said the company earns an estimated $7 billion in annual revenue from “fraudulent or otherwise prohibited advertisements” alone, in some cases by allegedly charging scammers a premium to post the ads.

“Meta might be a massive power broker in Silicon Valley and throughout the world, but Meta is not a company above the law,” LoPresti said during a press conference on Monday morning announcing the legal action.

He said with billions of scam ads on the platform, the types of scams run the gamut, including cryptocurrency scams, people impersonating celebrities or military personnel asking for money, or advertising “miracle cures to incurable diseases.”

“As civil prosecutors in Silicon Valley, we can’t allow a company as influential as Meta to continue perpetrating a scheme of this magnitude to deceive and victimize consumers,” he said.

The complaint claims Meta is violating false advertising and unfair competition laws, and asks a judge to order an injunction to stop the alleged practices. It also seeks monetary restitution and asks for civil penalties to be levied against Meta, some of which could be turned over to the county to be used for further consumer protection litigation.

The lawsuit rests heavily on internal leaked documents that were first reported by Reuters last fall. A May 2025 company internal presentation estimated that “Meta was involved in one third of all successful Internet scams in the U.S.,” the lawsuit said.

The county said Meta has contributed to more than $2.5 billion in losses for Californians in 2024, with seniors hit hardest. “Californians over 60 lost more than $800 million, and nationwide, older adults reported losses more than four times the average,” the county said in a statement.

A Meta spokesperson, in an emailed statement on Monday, said the company will fight the lawsuit. The legal action and the reporting it is largely based on distorts the company’s motives and ignores the “full range” of work done to combat scams, the statement said.

“We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they’re not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services. We removed over 159 million scam ads last year alone, launched new tools to protect people and partnered with law enforcement around the globe to disrupt these criminals,” the statement said.

LoPresti said in an interview that the company frequently touts the work it does against scams, while it is simultaneously “putting handcuffs on the fraud prevention teams” it employs.

“What our complaint alleges is that they have told those fraud prevention teams that they can’t do anything that actually impacts revenue by more than 0.15% of Meta’s total overall revenue,” LoPresti said. “So essentially what they’re saying is, ‘You can do your work, we want to brag about it, but we’re gonna make sure it doesn’t impact our bottom line too much.’”

The lawsuit alleges Meta also facilitates scam advertising “by promoting and providing special protections to supposedly ‘vetted’ business partners that make no secret of offering services to support scam advertisers.”

Meta’s own systems flag advertisements that are likely scams, but “instead of stopping those ads, the company charges scammers a premium price to run them, a practice that both facilitates and monetizes deception,” the county statement said.

Meta deliberately targets the most vulnerable people with scam ads, the suit said, and those who have clicked on illegitimate ads before will be shown more of them.

“Essentially, it’s like a bully finding the weak kid on the playground and making sure that they’re getting all of the attention,” LoPresti said. “The elderly, folks of color, low-income folks are disproportionately impacted by this kind of conduct. And that’s something that we believe really has to stop.”

Meta has faced a wave of litigation in recent years, including for allegedly employing addictive features that lead to mental health challenges, for not protecting young people and for using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models without permission.

LoPresti said his office is “excited to litigate” the case and expects to be able to hold Meta accountable for its actions.

“We can’t sit idly by when we know good and well that a tech giant is swindling the public to hit a revenue target,” LoPresti said. “Tech might be the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. And we benefit from it, and we celebrate that. But we can’t allow poison into that bloodstream.”