• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

There’s a lot going on in the world, so I won’t blame you for perhaps not having fully digested a Reuters report late last year that showed Meta has been raking in significant revenue (around $3 billion!) from Chinese "resellers" who are essentially running a global shell game, as reported by Reuters. These are highly sophisticated operations, allegedly with ties to the state, using the platform to push everything from scams to misinformation.

And while marketers spend months agonizing over a 0.5% shift in brand equity or whether a video spot has the "right" color grade, we are still, as an industry, collectively looking the other way when billions of dollars in ad spend are effectively being set on fire.

This isn’t just another "tech platform has a glitch" story, but a systemic, multibillion-dollar rot. And it makes clear where we (advertisers, agencies, marketers) stand in the pecking order of Silicon Valley’s priorities.

That fraud happens is not surprising. But that it is not addressed -- in this case by Meta -- because of the negative impact it would have on the company’s bottom line, is astonishing and very sad. It’s the classic "don't ask, don't tell" of the digital ecosystem. If the numbers look good in the quarterly business review, nobody wants to pull the thread that unravels the whole sweater.

But let’s be honest: As a marketing leader, you can’t afford to be the emperor without clothes.

When fraud of this scale is tolerated, it doesn't just hurt Meta's "integrity scores" (or what is left of them). It pollutes the entire pond we’re all swimming in. It inflates CPMs. It skews attribution models. It makes "high performing" look-alike audiences worthless, because everything is tainted with a massive amount of data that is “nonsense.”

If you’re a marketer, this isn’t just a digital team problem. This is a fiduciary failure. You are being sold "reach" that doesn't exist, and you optimize plans for engagement with ghosts.

So, what can you do about it (other than yelling at your Meta rep, who is likely a very nice person with zero power over global fraud policy)?

Stop relying on platform-reported metrics. If your dashboard says you had a 20% lift in traffic but your actual sales or lead-gen CRM data is flat, stop pretending the 20% matters. It’s time to move toward "Confirmed Human" metrics. Use third-party verification.

Audit your resellers and programmatic pipes. If you’re working through mid-tier agencies or resellers, ask for a full audit of where that inventory is sourced. If they can’t or don’t want to show you the path of the dollar from your bank account to the actual ad placement without it going through a "black box" in a high-risk region, cut the spend.

Most important: stop incentivizing teams and agencies based on "efficiency" (low CPMs). Buying traffic in bulk is really cheap and perhaps looks great on a spreadsheet. But it’s also totally useless. Start rewarding your teams for clean reach: actual, verifiable human attention.

It’s time to stop being "patient" with platforms that prioritize their topline revenue over the integrity of your media spend. If the platform won’t clean up the neighborhood, it’s probably time to move house.