New report: How Meta is monetising the migrant crisis
- Open Rights Group investigation reveals fraudulent adverts offering fake driving licences and passports still running on Facebook.
- Investigation is part of new report which examines how Meta’s surveillance advertising model enables vulnerable people to be targeted with disinformation, fraudulent ads and divisive content.
- Meta monetises from migrant crisis through ads placed by both criminals and the Home Office.
BAD ADS: TARGETED DISINFORMATION, DIVISION AND FRAUD ON META’s platforms
Read the reportHow Meta monetises the migrant crisis
Social media giant Meta is profiting from the global migrant crisis – enabling both criminals and the UK Home Office to target vulnerable migrants with adverts.
Research by ORG found that fraudulent adverts offering fake identity documents are still being run on Facebook. This is despite Meta claiming it had stamped out the problem after previous media coverage exposed the issue months ago.
Now ORG has discovered that these scams have not gone away. Instead, fraudsters are now using Facebook pages disguised as gaming communities to target migrants with illegal services.
One ad, placed by a page pretending to be about video gaming, offered EU identity documents and British passports for sale. It targeted men aged 18 and over in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
These findings expose the stark reality: even after public scandal and media scrutiny, Meta’s systems are still enabling fraudsters to reach vulnerable people — simply by disguising criminal adverts behind harmless-looking pages.
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Criminals Aren’t the Only Ones Targeting Migrants
But Meta’s profiling and microtargeting enables it to profit from all aspects of the global migrant crisis. Its vast surveillance infrastructure is also being used by the UK Home Office to target refugees with fear-based advertising — including campaigns designed to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats.
Previous research funded by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research found that Meta’s profiling tools allowed the Home Office to build ‘patchwork profiles’ of likely refugees — stitching together interests, behaviours, and language categories to target them with scare campaigns.
ORG’s Platform Power Programme Manager James Baker said:
“Meta are turning the migrant crisis into a marketplace, profiting while first criminal gangs then the UK Government target them with adverts. This isn’t just a failure of Meta to moderate content, it’s a feature of their intrusive surveillance capitalism model.”
Independent researcher James Riley, who carried out the investigation for ORG said:
“Behind the façade of personalisation, Meta’s surveillance-based ad system enables covert campaigns that target vulnerable people, promote illegal goods, and undermine democracy. Profiling and microtargeting continue to be weaponised to deceive, divide, and inflict harm. We need far stronger external oversight, far greater transparency, and serious action from Meta to prevent the harms exposed in this report from continuing.”
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Bad Ads: Targeted Disinformation, Division and Fraud on Meta’s Platforms
Social media giant Meta is profiting from the global migrant crisis – enabling both criminals and the UK Home Office to target vulnerable migrants with adverts.
Open Rights Groups’s report brings together existing and new evidence of how bad actors can and have used Meta’s targeted advertising system to access the attention of certain types of users with harmful adverts across five areas:
Democracy
Voter suppression, the targeting of minorities, electoral disinformation, and political manipulation by the Trump campaign, Musk-backed dark money groups, and Kremlin-linked actors.
Science
The COVID infodemic, vaccine disinformation and climate crisis obfuscation.
Hate
Sectarian division, far-right propaganda, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.
Fear
Targeting of vulnerable communities, UK Home Office migrant deterrence, and the reinforcement of trauma.
Fraud
Deepfake scams, financial fraud, and the use of targeted adverts to facilitate black market activities on Meta’s platforms.
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ORG is calling for:
- A clear and explicit opt-in for targeted advertising on Meta platforms.
- Full transparency on how ads are targeted in Meta’s public Ad Library.
- Proper resourcing for pre-publication ad moderation — to catch fraud and harmful content before it reaches users.
