Fraudulent ads are flooding social media. These former Meta employees have a plan

When the Dutch billionaire He sued TV producer John De Mol Facebook In 2019 due to its alleged failure to prevent scammers from using his image in deceptive ads, the social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet the DealMall team and speak to the media.

“The people promoting these types of ads are persistent, well-funded, and constantly improving their deceptive methods to get around our systems,” Leathern said. He said Reuters at the time.

During his four years at the company now known as deadLeathern 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 advertising products. He has regularly spoken to the media about fraudulent advertising. Leathern also oversaw transparency efforts such as the Meta Ad Library, the industry’s first free, searchable repository of digital ads, and the launch of identity verification for political advertisers.

But since he was left for dead at the end of 2020, Leathern has watched criminals spread deepfakes and use artificial intelligence to craft more convincing fraudulent ads. He said he was concerned that major platforms had failed to invest in teams and technology at the rate required to combat such exploitative ads.

“Technology and progress have been stagnant for the past five years,” Leathern said in an interview. “I also feel like we don’t really know how bad it is or what the current situation is. We don’t have objective ways of knowing.”

Leathern teamed up with Rob Goldman, former VP of advertising at Meta, to launch it CollectiveMetrics.orga non-profit organization that aims to bring more transparency to digital advertising in order to combat deceptive advertising. The goal is to use data and analytics to measure things like the prevalence of fraudulent online advertising and lift the veil on the opaque ad systems that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Meta.

Their efforts come as losses from scams rise 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 The victims collectively lost at least a trillion dollars last year. Global Fraud Status 2025 a report It found that 23 percent of people lost money to a scam.

The report said that many victims fail to report scams because they feel ashamed or because they do not know who to tell. Of those who reported a scam, more than a third said the platform “took no action after reporting it.”