When billionaire Dutch TV producer John de Mol sued Fb in 2019 over its alleged failure to cease scammers from utilizing his picture in misleading advertisements, the social media firm despatched Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to satisfy with Del Mol’s group and to talk with the media.
“The individuals who push these sorts of advertisements are persistent, they’re effectively funded, and they’re continuously evolving their misleading techniques to get round our programs,” Leathern advised Reuters on the time.
Throughout his 4 years on the firm now generally known as Meta, Leathern was in some ways the general public face of its effort to struggle rip-off advertisements. He led the enterprise integrity unit tasked with stopping scammers and different dangerous actors from abusing Meta’s ad merchandise. He frequently spoke to the media about rip-off advertisements. Leathern additionally oversaw transparency efforts just like the Meta Ad Library, the trade’s first free and searchable repository of digital advertisements, and the launch of id verification for political advertisers.
However since leaving Meta on the finish of 2020, Leathern has watched as criminals deployed deepfakes and used synthetic intelligence to craft extra convincing rip-off advertisements. He stated he grew to become alarmed as main platforms didn’t spend money on groups and expertise on the charge wanted to struggle such exploitative advertisements.
“The expertise and the progress has stagnated the final 5 years,” Leathern stated in an interview. “I additionally really feel like we simply do not actually know the way dangerous it is gotten or what the present state is. We do not have goal methods of figuring out.”
Leathern has teamed up with Rob Goldman, Meta’s former vice chairman of advertisements, to launch CollectiveMetrics.org, a nonprofit geared toward bringing extra transparency to digital promoting to be able to struggle misleading advertisements. The purpose is to make use of knowledge and evaluation to measure issues comparable to prevalence of on-line rip-off advertisements and to elevate the veil on the opaque ad programs that generate lots of of billions of {dollars} in income for corporations like Meta.
Their effort comes as losses attributable to scams have skyrocketed all over the world. The World Anti-Rip-off Alliance, a corporation that researches rip-off developments and contains leaders from Meta, Google, and different platforms on its advisory board, estimates that victims collectively misplaced not less than a trillion {dollars} final 12 months. Its 2025 World State of Scams report discovered that 23 % of individuals have misplaced cash to a rip-off.
The report stated that many victims fail to report scams attributable to feeling ashamed or as a result of they don’t know who to inform. Of those that did report a rip-off, greater than a 3rd stated that “no motion was taken by the platform after reporting it.”