Meta Platforms Inc. is escalating its legal offensive against fraudulent advertisers who exploit the likenesses of celebrities to peddle scam products, filing new lawsuits in Brazil and China that signal a more aggressive posture from the social media giant in policing its own advertising platform. The company announced the legal actions on Tuesday, marking its latest attempt to hold bad actors accountable for ads that deceive users and erode trust in the platforms that carry them.
The lawsuits target entities in two countries that represent significant advertising markets for Meta. In Brazil, Meta filed suit against an individual accused of running celebrity-bait ads that used deepfake technology and manipulated images of well-known public figures to promote fraudulent products. In China, the company sued a business that allegedly orchestrated similar schemes at scale, producing deceptive ads featuring unauthorized celebrity endorsements designed to lure users into purchasing bogus goods or surrendering personal information, as reported by Engadget.
The Anatomy of Celebrity-Bait Fraud
Celebrity-bait scams have become one of the most persistent and pernicious forms of advertising fraud on social media. The scheme is deceptively simple: bad actors create ads that feature the faces, voices, or fabricated endorsements of well-known figures—actors, athletes, business leaders, and politicians—to give fraudulent products an air of legitimacy. Victims who click through are often directed to fake storefronts or phishing pages where they are charged for products that never arrive, receive counterfeit goods, or have their financial data harvested.
The proliferation of generative AI tools has made these scams dramatically easier to produce and harder to detect. Deepfake video and audio can now be generated at low cost, allowing scammers to create convincing clips of celebrities appearing to endorse weight-loss supplements, cryptocurrency platforms, or miracle health cures. Meta acknowledged in its announcement that the sophistication of these operations has increased, with some networks deploying hundreds of ad variations across Facebook and Instagram to evade automated detection systems.
Meta’s Expanding Legal Strategy Against Ad Fraud
The lawsuits in Brazil and China are part of a broader legal strategy that Meta has been building over the past several years. The company has previously filed suits against entities engaged in scraping user data, creating fake accounts, and running deceptive advertising operations. In 2024, Meta took legal action against companies in multiple jurisdictions for running so-called “cloaking” operations—techniques that show compliant content to Meta’s ad review systems while serving scam content to actual users.
According to Engadget, Meta’s enforcement team identified the defendants through internal investigations that traced the fraudulent ad campaigns back to their operators. The company said it had already removed the offending accounts and ads from its platforms before filing suit, but that litigation was necessary to impose financial consequences and deter future bad actors. Meta is seeking both damages and permanent injunctions barring the defendants from using its platforms.
Why Brazil and China Are Key Battlegrounds
The choice of jurisdictions is telling. Brazil is Meta’s third-largest market by user count, with more than 110 million Facebook users and a rapidly growing Instagram user base. The country has also seen a surge in online fraud, with Brazilian authorities reporting sharp increases in social media scams targeting consumers. Celebrity-bait ads have been a particular problem in Brazil, where public figures including soccer stars and television personalities have had their likenesses hijacked for fraudulent promotions.
China, meanwhile, represents a different kind of challenge. While Meta’s platforms are blocked in mainland China, Chinese-based entities are among the most prolific producers of ads that run on Facebook and Instagram globally. These operations often target users in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, selling counterfeit goods or running outright scams. The cross-border nature of these operations makes enforcement extraordinarily difficult, and Meta’s decision to file suit in China reflects an effort to attack the supply side of the fraud chain at its source.
The Scale of the Problem—and the Limits of Automated Detection
Meta has invested billions of dollars in content moderation and ad review systems, employing a combination of machine learning models and human reviewers to screen the roughly 10 million ads that are submitted to its platforms daily. The company says it rejected more than 2.7 billion ads in 2023 for violating its policies, a figure that underscores both the scale of its enforcement efforts and the sheer volume of problematic content that advertisers attempt to push through.
Yet critics argue that Meta’s automated systems remain insufficient. Consumer advocacy groups and regulators in multiple countries have pointed out that celebrity-bait scams continue to appear in users’ feeds with alarming regularity, often running for days or weeks before being flagged and removed. Martin Lewis, a prominent British financial journalist whose likeness has been repeatedly used in scam ads on Facebook, has been among the most vocal critics, calling Meta’s response inadequate relative to the profits the company earns from its advertising business. Lewis has previously threatened legal action against Meta and has publicly pressured the company to implement more aggressive preemptive screening.
Regulatory Pressure Mounts on Multiple Fronts
Meta’s legal actions come at a time when regulators around the world are tightening their scrutiny of how social media companies handle fraudulent advertising. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect in 2024, imposes significant obligations on very large online platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, including those posed by deceptive advertising. Under the DSA, platforms can face fines of up to six percent of global annual revenue for non-compliance.
In Australia, the government has been developing a mandatory code of conduct for digital platforms that would require them to take greater responsibility for scam ads. Australian authorities have been particularly aggressive on this front after a series of high-profile cases in which consumers lost substantial sums to investment scams promoted through social media ads. Brazil’s own consumer protection framework, overseen by agencies such as Procon and the National Consumer Secretariat, has also been increasingly active in holding platforms accountable for the ads they serve.
The Tension Between Revenue and Responsibility
Meta’s advertising business generated approximately $131 billion in revenue in 2023, making it one of the most profitable advertising platforms in history. That financial success creates an inherent tension: every ad that Meta rejects represents lost revenue, while every scam ad that slips through damages user trust and invites regulatory action. The company has tried to thread this needle by emphasizing its enforcement numbers—the billions of ads rejected, the millions of accounts disabled—while simultaneously pursuing legal action against the most egregious offenders.
Industry analysts have noted that Meta’s lawsuits serve a dual purpose. They function as a deterrent to would-be scammers, but they also serve as a public relations tool, allowing the company to demonstrate proactive enforcement to regulators and lawmakers who might otherwise impose more onerous requirements. “Filing lawsuits in foreign jurisdictions is partly about sending a message,” said one digital advertising analyst who tracks Meta’s enforcement actions. “It shows regulators that the company is willing to spend money and legal resources going after bad actors, not just blocking their accounts.”
What Comes Next for Platform Accountability
The question facing Meta—and its competitors, including Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok, which face similar problems—is whether litigation and automated enforcement can keep pace with the industrialization of ad fraud. The barriers to entry for running celebrity-bait scams have fallen dramatically as AI tools have become more accessible, and the global nature of the internet means that bad actors can operate from jurisdictions where enforcement is weak or nonexistent.
Meta has signaled that it intends to continue filing lawsuits as part of its enforcement strategy, and the company has been expanding its partnerships with law enforcement agencies in multiple countries to share intelligence on fraud networks. But legal experts caution that lawsuits alone are unlikely to solve the problem. “You can sue individual operators, but if the underlying economic incentives remain—if it’s still profitable to run these scams—new operators will emerge to replace the ones you shut down,” said one attorney specializing in internet fraud litigation.
For now, Meta’s lawsuits in Brazil and China represent the latest chapter in what has become a perpetual arms race between platform operators and the fraudsters who exploit their systems. The company’s willingness to pursue legal action across borders is notable, but the ultimate measure of success will be whether users see fewer scam ads in their feeds—a metric that remains stubbornly difficult to move in the right direction.
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