Fraudulent advertisements are flooding social networks. These former Meta members have a plan
When the Dutch billionaire Television producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to prevent fraudsters from using his image in misleading advertisements. The social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet the Del Mol team and speak with the media.
“The people who run these kinds of ads are persistent, they are well funded and they are constantly evolving their deceptive tactics to circumvent our systems,” Leathern told Reuters at the time.
During his four years with the company now known as Meta, Leathern was in many ways the public face of its efforts to combat fraudulent advertising. He led the Business Integrity Unit responsible for preventing fraudsters and other bad actors from abusing Meta’s advertising products. He regularly spoke to the media about fraudulent advertisements. 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 leaving Meta in late 2020, Leathern has watched criminals deploy deepfakes and use artificial intelligence to create more convincing fraudulent ads. He said he was alarmed that major platforms had failed to invest in teams and technology at the pace needed to combat such exploitative ads.
“Technology and progress have stagnated over the last five years,” Leathern said in an interview. “I also feel like we just don’t know how bad the situation has gotten or what the current state is. We don’t have an objective way of knowing.”
Leathern teamed up with Rob Goldman, former Meta VP of Advertising, to launch CollectiveMetrics.org, a nonprofit aimed at bringing more transparency to digital advertising to combat misleading ads. The goal is to use data and analytics to measure things like the prevalence of fraudulent ads online and lift the veil on the opaque ad schemes that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Meta.
Their efforts come as losses from scams have soared around the world. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance, an organization that studies scam trends and includes executives from Meta, Google and other platforms on its advisory board, estimates that victims collectively lost at least $1 trillion last year. Its report on the global state of scams in 2025 reveals that 23% of people have lost money to a scam.
The report says many victims don’t report scams because they’re ashamed or because they don’t know who to tell. Of those who reported a scam, more than a third said “no action was taken by the platform after reporting it.”
