Mark Cuban keeps getting emails about a $294 diabetes cure he has never sold.
"Every single week I get emails from little old men and ladies saying, 'Will my cure for diabetes work?' or 'I just ordered your cure for diabetes for $294,'" the 68-year-old billionaire investor said on an August episode of Pivot, the podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.
Must Read
Those ads are deepfakes built with an AI copy of his face and voice, Cuban said, and Meta (NASDAQ:META) runs them anyway. "Facebook knows the little old ladies are getting ripped off," he said. He called the platform "the worst of the worst."
The ads Cuban says Meta waves through
Cuban said some of the ads even include a disclaimer admitting the person on screen is AI-generated and the clip is meant as entertainment. By the time anyone gets to it, he argued, the pitch has already worked. "And to Facebook, that's good enough," he said.
"The point is, that defines the culture of the organization," Cuban said. A company that lets scammers go after people's grandparents, he argued, has shown what it will tolerate at every level.
Cuban does run a drug company — he co-founded Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that sells low-cost generic medications.
What Meta's documents showed
On Nov. 6, 2025, Reuters reported on internal Meta documents showing the company expected roughly $16 billion, or about 10% of its 2024 revenue, to flow in from ads pushing scams and prohibited products. By Meta's own internal count, users across its apps were seeing some 15 billion "higher risk" ads a day — the ones with obvious markers of fraud. One late 2024 document put that category's value at about $7 billion a year.
In a May 2025 presentation, Meta's own safety staff estimated the company's platforms play a part in a third of the scams that succeed in the U.S. Before Meta bans an advertiser, its automated systems must peg the account as at least 95% likely to be running a scam, the documents say. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer simply pays more per ad and stays live.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters the documents "present a selective view that distorts Meta's approach to fraud and scams," and called the company's 10% estimate "rough and overly-inclusive." Complaints from users about scam ads had fallen 58% over the prior 18 months, he said at the time, and the company pulled down more than 134 million scam ads in 2025. The same documents note the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into Meta over advertising tied to financial fraud.
Meanwhile, Meta's newest AI product has been causing headaches of its own. A Toronto man let the company's AI agent run his Facebook Marketplace listings on Sept. 26, and it gave a buyer his street address and said yes to a lowball offer. He later traced part of the problem to a permission setting he'd picked.
Why older adults keep paying the price
Older Americans lose more to this kind of crime than any other age group. People 60 and older told the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center they lost $7.7 billion in 2025, across 201,266 complaints — 59% more money than the year before, according to the bureau's 2025 Internet Crime Report. Investment schemes did the worst damage at $3.5 billion, with tech and customer support scams taking another $1.04 billion.
AI showed up in more than 3,100 of those complaints, and together those victims lost over $352 million. That's only counting the people who spoke up — plenty never file at all.
How to protect yourself — and your parents
Anytime you see a famous face advertising something pop up in your feed, assume it's fake — Cuban himself included in that. Run the product's name through a search with the word "scam" next to it. Then think about who in your family is on Facebook the most – and send them a message warning them about it.
And if you suspect anything fishy, file a report the same day to the Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov. The FBI froze $32.9 million worth of funds tied to older victims' cases in 2025, the agency says, but it can only chase money it knows about.
Moneywise reached out to Meta for comment on Cuban's reply but did not immediately receive a response.
What To Read Next
Get Warren Buffett's best investing lessons, free. Join 250,000 readers getting Moneywise's sharpest money reporting every week. Subscribe and we'll send you our guide to the ideas that built Buffett's fortune as a welcome gift.
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Mark Cuban says Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads as Meta docs reveal $16 billion in fraud-linked revenue
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.