Mark Cuban gets emails every week from elderly people asking about a $294 diabetes cure he never sold. The ads are AI deepfakes built with his face and voice, run on Meta's platforms. Cuban co-founded Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy selling low-cost generics — not miracle cures. The scammers are hijacking his likeness to fleece vulnerable people, and he says Meta lets it happen because the money clears. The receipts arrived in November 2025 when Reuters reported on internal Meta documents quantifying the problem. By Meta's own accounting, roughly $16 billion in 2024 ad revenue — about 10% of the company's total — flowed from ads pushing scams and prohibited products. Users across Meta's apps were seeing approximately 15 billion "higher risk" ads per day, the ones with obvious fraud markers. A late 2024 internal document valued that category alone at about $7 billion annually. The enforcement architecture tells you everything. Meta's automated systems must peg an advertiser account as at least 95% likely to be fraudulent before issuing a ban. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer pays a higher cost-per-ad and stays live. This is not a bug in content moderation — it is a pricing mechanism. The system converts regulatory risk into a revenue premium. Scammers who are 94% likely to be scammers are not removed; they are monetized at a higher rate. Meta's own safety staff estimated in a May 2025 presentation that the company's platforms play a part in one-third of successful scams in the United States. That is not an external accusation — it is an internal assessment by the people whose job is to measure the problem. Some of the deepfake ads Cuban flagged even include disclaimers admitting the person on screen is AI-generated and the clip is meant as entertainment. By the time anyone scrolls to the fine print, the pitch has already landed. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters the documents "present a selective view that distorts Meta's approach to fraud and scams" and called the 10% revenue estimate "rough and overly-inclusive." He cited a 58% decline in user complaints about scam ads over 18 months and said the company pulled down more than 134 million scam ads in 2025. The question is not whether Meta removes some scam ads — it clearly does. The question is whether the enforcement threshold is set to protect users or to protect the revenue line. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now looking into Meta over advertising tied to financial fraud, according to the same internal documents. Cuban's framing cuts to the structural point: a company that lets scammers target people's grandparents with AI deepfakes has shown what it will tolerate at every level. "That defines the culture of the organization," he said. The 95% threshold is the story. It means Meta has built a system where the default state for a suspected scammer is continued operation with a price surcharge. The company has effectively created a tax on fraud rather than a prohibition of it. At $16 billion in estimated fraud-linked revenue, the incentive to lower that threshold is fighting the incentive to keep the money flowing.
