The coordinated action, announced Feb. 26, targets operations that used techniques ranging from AI-generated celebrity deepfakes to sophisticated website cloaking to defraud users across multiple countries. Meta said it has also issued cease-and-desist letters to eight former business partners and helped law enforcement in the U.K. and Nigeria take down a scam center, resulting in seven arrests.
“Those who seek to exploit others on our platforms will be held accountable,” the company said.
At the center of one lawsuit is Vietnam-based Ly Van Lam, who Meta says used a technique called cloaking to bypass its ad review system. Cloaking works by showing moderators a seemingly legitimate website during the review process, then redirecting actual users to entirely different, malicious content.
Lam’s ads offered deeply discounted products from luxury brand Longchamp in exchange for completing a survey. Users who engaged were taken to websites requesting credit card information for purchases that were never fulfilled. Worse, their cards were then hit with unauthorized recurring charges, a scheme Meta calls subscription fraud.
Maison Longchamp said it has “a zero tolerance policy” toward fraud using its brand and welcomed Meta’s action. “For this fight to be efficient, we need to rely on active cooperation between all stakeholders, including intermediaries,” the company said.
In Brazil, Meta sued two separate operations that used altered celebrity images and deepfakes of a prominent physician to promote fraudulent healthcare products. One of the operations also sold courses teaching others the same scam tactics. In China, the company sued the Shenzhen Yunzheng Technology company for using celeb-bait ads to lure people in the U.S., Japan and other countries into fake investment groups.
Celeb-bait, the practice of misusing celebrity images to make scam ads look like legitimate endorsements, has become one of the most persistent challenges for social media platforms. Meta said it now protects the images of more than 500,000 public figures worldwide through a dedicated program designed to detect when their likenesses are being exploited.
To counter increasingly sophisticated fraud techniques, Meta said it is deploying new AI tools that analyze cloaking behavior and identify ads redirecting to harmful websites more quickly, allowing the company to reject malicious ads and respond faster to user reports.
The scale of the problem is staggering. In the first half of 2025 alone, Meta detected and took action against nearly 12 million accounts linked to scam centers across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp globally.
Vietnam has emerged as a particular hotspot. During the same period, Meta removed more than 5.4 million pieces of content on Facebook and 14,000 on Instagram in the country for violating fraud and deception policies. More than 116,000 Facebook accounts and 28,000 Instagram accounts were suspended, with 65% on Facebook and 93% on Instagram detected and removed automatically before users even reported them.
Meta also sent cease-and-desist letters to eight former Meta Business Partners for offering abusive services, including phony account restoration and renting access to trusted accounts to help clients evade enforcement. The company warned it would pursue further legal action if they did not comply.
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