A group of news publishers have filed a police complaint against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over scam Facebook ads which steal the identities of journalists.
Such promotions have been widespread on the Meta platform and include adverts which purport to be authored by trusted names in the media.
Swedish publishers group Utgivarna includes the three public broadcasters Sveriges Television, UR and Sveriges Radio, commercial TV group TV4 and Tidningsutgivarna (the national newspaper association) and Sveriges Tidskrifter (the national magazines association).
A report handed to police on riday, 28 November, by Utgivarna accuses Meta of fraud, complicity in fraud and preparation for fraud.
According to Utgivarna: “These ads exploit media companies and journalists, cause both financial and psychological harm to innocent people, while Meta earns large sums by publishing the fraudulent content.”
According to internal company documents, reported by Reuters, Meta earns around $16bn per year from fraudulent advertising.
Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted the use of well-known UK and US journalists to promote scam investment groups on Facebook. These include so-called pig-butchering schemes, whereby scammers win the trust of victims over weeks or months before persuading them to hand over money.
‘Meta users that trust our brands fooled into buying crypto and useless stocks’
Vice chair of Utgivarna Thomas Mattson told Press Gazette said Swedish publishers have repeatedly tried and failed to get the scam ads taken down.
He added: “We have used Meta´s suggested alert systems to try to unpublish fake ads using our media brands and journalists, but the response if any is slow and very often obvious frauds are being kept on Facebook and Instagram despite our warnings and protests. We have also met with Meta and even visited the London office to meet with executives in order to declare that is unacceptable that Meta users that trust our media brands are being fooled to buy crypto and useless stocks and that Meta continues this, in fact, cooperation with criminals.
“When Meta officials tried to claim that they ‘only build the highway and are not responsible for speeders’, I personally corrected them to say that a better comparison is drug crimes. It may be that Meta does not actually hand over drugs to users, but Meta is smuggling the drugs into Sweden so that other illegal gangs can make money out of it. The very model of selling sponsored posts without pre-checking the content is what makes it possible for criminals to deal with Meta.”
Asked which Meta employees could be held culpable or the fraud complaint, he said: “In theory, the highest representative of Meta can be held responsible and that would be Mr. Zuckerberg himself. No Swedish employees, the few ones that are left since cost cuts, have a say in the fraudster business and this is probably a problem by itself.
“When we ask if Meta has any Swedish-speaking staff based in Sweden that monitors ads and acts on alerts of suspected frauds, we really don´t get any answers despite contextual and cultural knowledge being super-important if you are to understand if a screenshot from that looks like an established newspaper web site is authentic or not.
“I don´t think that some youngsters in Dublin, or wherever Meta employs the few monitors, can understand whether it´s really ‘TV4’ or ‘Expressen’ or not. Meta really must step up here, now they are running an operation that enables criminal gangs to trick people, and this is also very profitable for Mr. Zuckerbergs companies.”
Meta: ‘Fighting scams is one of our top priorities’
Press Gazette put the Utgivarna complaint to Meta.
A spokeperson said: “Fighting scams on our platforms is one of our top priorities and as scammers have grown in sophistication in recent years, so have our efforts.
“We’ve launched tools to help businesses find and report scam ads that impersonate their brand, collaborated with cross-industry partners to disrupt these networks, and rolled out facial recognition technology to detect and remove celeb-bait ads.
“In the last 15 months, reports from users about scam ads have declined by more than 50%, and so far in 2025, we’ve removed more than 134 million scam ads on our services. People on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.”
In October 2024, Meta announced the testing of facial recognition technology “to help protect people rom celeb bait ads and enable faster account recovery”.
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