The Responsibility Facade
Internal docs say Meta made billions from scam and illegal-gambling ads, while sweeps casinos are busy trying to look “responsible” on the same platforms.
Meta has a new problem, and it’s not a small one.
Internal documents seen by Reuters say the company expected around 10% of its 2024 revenue — roughly $16 billion — to come from ads tied to scams and banned products, including illegal online casinos and other unlicensed gambling. Those same decks estimate users are seeing about 15 billion “high-risk” scam ads a day, from fake investments to dodgy shops to black-market casino sites.
All of this is running on the same platforms where legitimate sweepstakes and social-casino brands are busy jumping through Meta’s gambling rules, while Meta’s own ad stack has been happily pushing illegal gambling to anyone who clicks.
How Meta Handles Bad Actors
The most brutal part of the leak is how Meta’s systems treat advertisers it knows are risky.
Inside the docs, Meta’s own tools only move to ban an advertiser when they’re about 95% sure it’s fraud. Below that, the ad doesn’t disappear, it only just gets more expensive. Instead of “you’re out,” the default is basically “you can stay if you pay more”.
One internal review of fraud forums put it even more bluntly:
“It is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google.”
One internal planning doc even put a hard limit on how much money Meta was willing to give up to clean things up. It said efforts to tackle scams, illegal gambling, and other banned products shouldn’t take more than 0.15% of total revenue, which is only a tiny slice of the roughly $90 billion Meta pulled in during the first half of 2025.
Around the same time, Meta’s own safety team estimated that its platforms are tied to about a third of all successful scams in the U.S. The company says that picture is unfair and points to a 58% drop in scam-ad reports and more than 134 million scam items that were removed in 2025 alone.
Even so, once you line those numbers up, it’s hard to pretend scam and illegal-gambling ads are just “slipping through the cracks.” They’re clearly part of the business.
While Sweeps Get Squeezed
Most of the headlines have focused on fake shops and sketchy crypto, but that same “scam revenue” pile also includes illegal online casinos and unlicensed gambling sites. That’s where things start to overlap with the world sweepstakes lives in.
In 2025 alone, Michigan, New York, West Virginia, Louisiana, Minnesota and a few others have all gone after sweepstakes casinos and similar unlicensed models with opinions, subpoenas or cease-and-desist letters. At the platform level, Google has decided “sweepstake casinos” aren’t social casinos anymore, and YouTube is age-restricting social-casino and sweeps content while dragging skins and NFTs into its gambling rules.
In other words, sweeps brands are being told to act more like fully regulated gambling: cleaner language, tighter funnels, smaller reach. And right next to that, Meta’s own docs show that truly illegal gambling has been sitting inside the revenue machine, not outside it.
The Meta Rulebook
To be fair to Meta, there is a rulebook.
To run gambling or social-casino ads on Facebook or Instagram, you’re supposed to get pre-approval, target only places where it’s legal, and have the right licenses or legal backing. Sweepstakes and social-casino products are now treated as gambling games, not cute “just for fun” apps.
For sweeps brands, that means changing how they show up on Meta: less hard “casino” talk, clearer explanations of their coins, and more campaigns getting questioned or slowed down.
From the outside, it makes Meta look tougher than it used to be. The leak just adds the twist that the careful operators aren’t the only ones the system is letting in.
The Double Standard — And Why It Matters for Sweeps
If you’re a sweeps operator actually trying to follow the rules, the whole thing starts to look a bit absurd. You’re tweaking copy, geo-fencing half the map and triple-checking “no purchase necessary,” while Meta’s own files show some outright illegal casinos are allowed to keep buying ads until the system is 95% sure they’re frauds. Until then, they don’t get banned, they just get charged more.
From a regulator’s point of view, none of that nuance matters. They’re already suspicious of sweeps, and now they’re reading that Meta’s platforms are tied to a big chunk of successful scams in the U.S., with illegal gambling in the mix. That doesn’t make anyone more patient with the “we’re sweepstakes, not a casino” speech.
For sweeps brands that stay on Meta, the bar just went up. You need to be painfully clear about how your coins work, how free entry actually functions, and who you refuse to sit next to. The last place you want your logo is on a slide next to an obviously illegal casino, with everyone in the room treating them as the same thing.
The Bottom Line
Meta’s own docs show scam and illegal-gambling ads are big business, not a glitch. For sweepstakes casinos, that means one thing: if you want to stay in the game, you need to look visibly different from the scams Meta’s been cashing in on — in your product, your promos and your partners.
Blaise Luis
