Meta's Own Files Put Scam Ads at Ten Percent. Meta Says Less.
The committee wanted a number on Meta scam ads. A senior in Orillia had one, nearly a million.
A senior in Orillia, Ontario, put nearly a million dollars into an investment that did not exist. The pitch came with a familiar face attached to it, a trusted public figure moving and speaking in a short video. The face was fake. The money was real, and it was gone.
That is the shape of the problem the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology sat down to examine on June 8, 2026: online fraud, deepfakes, and who is legally on the hook when a scam runs on a platform built to sell ads. Somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area, another victim was out $100,000 the same way. These are individual cases, but they trace a pattern the committee kept circling, investment and romance scams sharpened by artificial intelligence and aimed squarely at older Canadians. The investment pitch and the romance pitch run on the same machinery, and both end with the victim sending the money themselves.
The scams work because the faces are convincing. Manipulated videos have put words in the mouths of Mark Carney, Doug Ford, and François Legault, each pulled without consent into an ad built to bait a viewer into wiring money. A recognizable politician endorsing a can’t-miss return is an old con. What is new is that the endorsement can be manufactured in an afternoon and served to exactly the people most likely to act on it.
What Meta’s scam ads are actually worth
The hard question in the room was not whether scams exist on Meta’s platforms. It was how much of Meta’s money comes from them.
Leaked internal documents from 2024 gave one answer. In those documents, Meta’s own estimate was that roughly 10 percent of its global advertising revenue came from ads tied to scams, banned goods, or otherwise misleading content. That figure was generated inside Meta, before any regulator came asking.
Meta’s representatives gave the committee a different figure. The real number, they said, was between 3 and 4 percent, and the company had cut that in half again over the course of 2025. So the range the committee was left to reconcile ran from the company’s public account, 3 to 4 percent, to the company’s own internal estimate, 10.
Rachel Curran, Meta Canada’s Director of Public Policy, told the committee the company has spent $30 billion globally on safety, security, and anti-fraud work over the past decade. She drew a hard line when a member put the sharper allegation to her, that Meta runs a deliberate cost-benefit calculation and keeps scam ads because they pay.
“I’m going to disagree wholeheartedly with that,” she said. “That’s bullshit.”
The record does not settle which number is right. It settles that both came from Meta.
A regulator across the ocean already ran the math
Canada’s committee was not the first body to try to size the problem. A late-2024 report from the United Kingdom’s Payment Systems Regulator found that Meta’s platforms were the origin point for 54 percent of all authorized push payment scam incidents in the UK in 2023. Authorized push payment fraud is the category where the victim is tricked into sending the money themselves, which is exactly what a deepfake investment ad is built to make someone do.
More than half of a country’s tracked scam-payment incidents, traced to one company’s platforms. The Orillia loss and the Greater Toronto Area loss are Canadian entries in that same column. That independent benchmark sat behind the Canadian hearing, next to the 3-to-4-percent account.
The fix almost everyone in the room wanted
On one point there was agreement, and the parties agreeing are the notable part. The Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange and Meta itself both asked Parliament to pass what they called safe harbour legislation.
The idea is narrow. Privacy and competition law currently makes it legally risky for a bank, a telecom, and a platform to share real-time fraud signals with one another, things like a malicious domain or a phone number that has just surfaced in a scam. Safe harbour rules would give those institutions legal cover to trade those signals fast enough to stop a fraudulent transaction before the money moves. Because the fraud completes in a single transfer, the signals only help if they arrive before the money does. Meta already runs private versions of this, through what it calls its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange with banks and a Global Signal Exchange. The request to Parliament was to make the wider practice legally safe.
That is an unusual alignment for a committee room: the company under scrutiny and a threat-intelligence body pressing for the same rule.
The other fight Meta brought with it
Meta arrived carrying a second dispute, and it shapes what Canadians can even see when a scam surfaces. Under the Online News Act standoff, Meta continues to block all Canadian news articles from Facebook and Instagram. Its position is that the value in the old arrangement ran the other way, toward publishers, who by Meta’s estimate received about $300 million a year in free distribution across the two platforms.
The consequence is quiet. A platform that a UK regulator ties to more than half of that country’s scam-payment incidents is also the platform where Canadian users no longer see Canadian journalism about those scams. The record does not argue the point. It sets the two facts side by side.
What Meta put on the table for 2026
Meta gave the committee a forward-looking commitment. By the end of 2026, the company said, 90 percent of its advertising revenue will come from verified advertisers, up from 70 percent at the end of 2025. Verification is the mechanism Meta pointed to as its answer, on the theory that a scammer willing to submit to identity checks is a scammer more easily caught.
Whether that closes the distance between 3 percent and 10 percent is not something the committee resolved, and not something the record claims. What the record establishes is smaller and firmer. A senior in Orillia lost close to a million dollars to a face that was not real. A UK regulator placed more than half of its national scam-payment incidents on Meta’s platforms. And Meta’s own 2024 files carried a number the company spent the hearing arguing down.
The committee has the evidence. The number is still in dispute. The money is still gone.
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Source Documents
House of Commons Canada. (2026, June 8). Evidence. Standing Committee on Industry and Technology, 45th Parliament, 1st Session.