Scam ads on Meta enabled large-scale looting of Australians’ savings, Forrest claims
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, allegedly deleted key evidence in a landmark US lawsuit brought by mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, who said the tech giant’s advertising systems were helping criminals plunder Australians’ savings on an industrial scale.
The US civil case is the highest-profile legal issue to date over the way Meta’s ad machine handles fraudulent content, and its outcome could reshape the rules for tech platforms globally.
Forrest’s fight began in 2021, when he sued Meta in a California court after years of his face being used in fake crypto ads on Facebook and Instagram, which were allegedly used to persuade ordinary Australians to hand over their savings to criminals.
Forrest’s legal team argues that Meta is not just a passive billboard for scammers, but that automated, AI-powered advertising tools, such as the “Advantage+” system, are also actively creating and amplifying fraudulent content. They say advertisers provide basic text, images and video, and Meta’s software then rewrites headlines, highlights key phrases, crops and boosts images, and selects thumbnails using generative AI to make pitches more appealing, before targeting systems push those ads to users most likely to click, including vulnerable investors in Australia.
In US legal filings viewed by this imprint, Forrest accuses Meta of ruining ad data vital to the case by failing to preserve the latest versions of nearly 30,000 fraudulent ads misusing his name and image, even though he was sent a letter in August 2019 warning of an impending lawsuit and demanding that it “preserve all data related to the ads.”
Forrest’s allegations echo one of Australia’s most notorious document destruction scandals. In 2002, Victorian Supreme Court judge Geoffrey Eames found that law firm Clayton Utz and its client British American Tobacco systematically destroyed thousands of scientific documents to deny dying cancer patient Rolah McCabe a fair trial; This finding, although rejected on appeal, led to legal reform and a reckoning over the destruction of institutional evidence.
Meta plans to argue that Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from liability for third-party content, protects it from Forrest’s claims.
But Forrest’s lawyers say Meta allowed key databases to continue to be automatically deleted and can no longer show how fraudulent ads actually appear on screen, or exactly how its systems altered the original ad material before people saw it.
Without that data, Forrest says, he can’t disprove Meta’s claim that anything illegal comes only from fraudulent advertisers.
access point
Forrest is asking U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts to find Meta violated federal evidence preservation rules and impose sanctions that would effectively weaken his Section 230 defense. He wants the judge to find sufficient doubt about Meta’s claim to legal immunity and for the jury to decide that; stopping Meta from arguing that the gaps in the records were Forrest’s problem; and telling jurors they can assume Meta’s advertising tools are on and working in full force on scam ads for which detailed data is currently missing.
At a hearing on Feb. 24, fellow judge Virginia DeMarchi ordered Meta to disclose what, if any, fraud or fraudulent review it engages in after an advertiser hits “publish” but before it is delivered to users. The judge also ordered Meta to disclose any internal “scoring” it used to rate the likelihood of an ad violating its fraud policies and to report what it produced.
Meta denies wrongdoing and is given extra time to respond. A hearing is scheduled for April 16. The company also told the court that it acted diligently in discovery and pushed back on Forrest’s claims of plunder, that it did not routinely retain every final ad impression, and that some of the data it requested either did not exist in the form it described or was unduly burdensome to retrieve.
Roughly a tenth of Meta’s total revenue comes from fraudulent advertising and banned products, according to internal documents reported by Reuters in November 2025. It showed that Meta predicted it would earn about US$16 billion ($22.6 billion) in 2024 – about 10 per cent of its annual revenue – from fraud and advertising for banned goods; An internal slide estimated that the company serves 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads to users every day across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta said the analysis was conducted to justify planned integrity investments, calling the figures “crude and overly inclusive.”
Australians lost more than $2 billion to fraud in 2024, according to combined data from the National Anti-Fraud Centre. Worldwide losses exceeded $1.4 trillion According to the Global Anti-Fraud Alliance.
Australia’s competition watchdog, the ACCC, is pursuing its own Federal Court case accusing Meta of profiting from scams, including a scheme that used images of former NSW premier Mike Baird to lure victims into fake crypto investments. This case is still in the courts.
Meta and Forrest have been contacted for comment. The case continues.
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers big stories, exclusive news and expert insights. Sign up to receive it every weekday morning.
David Swan is the technology editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor of The Australian newspaper.Connect with: X or email.
