25 Jan 2026 Search

It took me a while to get around to watching the whole video on The Drum: Watch Mark Ritson share his 10 global marketing moments of 2025. Number two is the Meta scam ads situation. Professor Ritson calls it A spectacular amount of corporate malfeasance, and adds,

What really disappoints me is the marketing reaction to this has been non-existent. This stuff has been out now for a month—marketers don’t talk about it, no one is even concerned with it.

Yes, this is the kind of story that might have gotten a lot more attention in the past, but the advertising business has gotten remarkably hollowed out as the Meta+Google advertising duopoly has grown to take up about half—maybe a majority by now—of global ad budgets. If everyone on the agency side is in hardcore mode, playing the layoffs reality show for high stakes, and pretending to be good at AI, there’s not a lot of time left in the day for digging into corporate crimes.

Scams on Meta aren’t just a problem for big agencies and the kinds of big brands that hire big agencies. Meta’s scam policy is a potential company-killing problem for smaller companies, which Meta admits are more locked in to Meta than the bigger advertisers that have more options. For example, Lars Lofren covers The Weighted Highland Cow Scam: How it Works and Where to Buy a Real Highland Cow. At this point, if you do buy a weighted highland cow on the internet, you’re more likely to get scammed than get a legitimate product.

Two legit companies make two popular stuffed toys. The real ones are the uoozii®20” | 4 Pounds Highland Cow | Zipped Warmable & Coolable Pouch and the SnugglePals Highland Cow Stuffed Animal | Jumbo Sized | 16” Tall. But most of the ads that claim to be for these are really some scam advertiser, running a simple scheme.

  1. Run ads on Facebook

  2. Steal a creator video and use that as your ad.

  3. Point people to your fake website.

  4. Don’t deliver a product at all or deliver an inferior product that costs almost nothing.

  5. Repeat under new brands as needed.

The reason this whole “business” model works so well for Meta is that Meta doesn’t just receive 10% of its revenue from ads for scams and banned items. Ads on the Meta sites and apps have to bid against each other in a complicated internal auction, and the presence of the extra scam bidders drives up the price for everyone else. Meta might be receiving 10% of their ad revenue from scam advertisers, but that doesn’t mean scam advertisers are only responsible for 10% of their ad revenue. Ritson, in his video, says Meta is making $16 billion from all this, but that does not count increased ad rates charged to legit advertisers who are forced to bid against scammers. The real cost is much higher. Anyway, read the whole thing.

In other Meta news, Meta sued over claims that WhatsApp messages are fully secure. It’s a class action case in California. I RECAPed a copy of the complaint in Dawson v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 3:26-cv-00751 and it looks like what the plaintiffs have to go on is a whistleblower inside Meta, claiming that there’s an internal process for employees to request access to the content of WhatsApp messages.

Naturally, this is a #hugeIfTrue moment, but so far all the comments have been all like, yeah, seems right to me. (and why does WhatsApp get so little grief from law enforcement about end-to end encryption, anyway?) Meta executives lie, Meta lawyers teach execs to hide evidence, it’s just more Meta doing what they do. Nobody seems particularly surprised. Big companies get lawsuits filed against them all the time, some justified, some not so much. The Internet’s willingness to believe, right away, that Meta is lying about a core product feature should be a pretty solid indication of Meta’s reputation level.

More: the silence of the Meta advertisers

Beam me up, Mozilla

David Gerard links to a blog post called How Mozilla builds now, which claims they’re working on

an enterprise version of Firefox that treats the browser as critical infrastructure for modern work, not a data collection surface.

It me. I am enterprise. I can haz enterprise version?

As far as I can tell, Mozilla is still working with Meta—yes, seriously, read the room here people—on built-in advertising tracking for Firefox. If regular Firefox is going to be a data collection surface for Meta, that’s a deal-breaker for regular people with common sense, I mean enterprises, yeah, that’s it, like me.

For now, if you need an “enterprise” level of protection from scams and slop, Just the Browser will install config files to avoid a bunch of growth hacking and slop features. More: a Terminator ending for Google Privacy Sandbox?