Big Tech. Big Social. Big Fraud.

Imagine going to the grocery store every week and buying eggs. Many of us do just that. Now imagine getting home every single time to find half of the eggs are completely empty. You crack them and there is nothing inside. Imagine that happening week after week. How long before consumers question the grocery store managers and how long would it take for consumers to become enraged at being ripped off every week? Exactly how long before lawyers got involved in a class action suit against “big egg” and politicians take to the microphones demanding answers from the egg industry?

While that may seem silly or hyperbolic, that is precisely what big tech, big social and adtech do to the brands that spent roughly $650 billion using their platforms in 2024. Read that again. I am absolutely saying big social and big tech are knowingly stealing money from their customers through intentionally committing preventable fraud. AND I can even tell you why they are doing it. Let’s get into it.

Here are some points of reference you must understand at a basic level to go down this rabbit hole. I will keep it simple.

1. All platforms serve paid ads to what are called MAIDs. This stands for Mobile Ad ID. Devices that access their platforms and the internet as a whole all have a MAID. That includes smart phones, tablets, computers, connected TVs and wearable tech as well.
2. These platforms all store the MAIDs you access their platform with and tether them to the profile you use. On META, for example, the profile you setup and sign into when you login, that you like and comment from, read content with and use to navigate Facebook, IG and Threads with, are all correlated to MAIDs you use to conduct that behavior.
3. All MAIDs have signal data. That is how our device activity is measured, logged, and manipulated by these algorithms.

With just that basic understanding of how it works, you’ll be able to easily tell how intentional this fraud is and how easily they could prevent it. Obviously, it is more complicated, but this basic understanding is all one needs to have, to see the problem.

Now that we have that basic understanding, let’s take a look at what we know to be the case as it stands in 2025.

• We know that over 50% of every paid ad is never seen by a human being on platforms like social media. These platforms are serving ads to fake MAIDs or “bots”. That means OVER ½ of every dollar you spend is completely wasted.
• PPC (pay per click) traffic from search engines like Google are delivering an even higher volume of “bot” traffic. That means if you’re spending $1 per click and you allocate $1,000 ad spend to buy those clicks, at the very least, 600 of those clicks are not real people.
• Big Tech and Big Social are well aware of just these 2 basic facts.
• Regulators, like congress, are not only feckless, but they are clueless as well. Big Tech and Big Social do their bidding and write them very large checks, so they will likely never care about fixing the fraud.

In Layman’s terms, Big Tech and Big Social are knowingly serving ads to fake mobile ad IDs knowing you will get zero benefit from it, and they know those ads are completely wasted.

Those ads are the eggs with nothing inside the shell.

These fake mobile ad IDs account for almost ½ of all internet traffic and can be bot farms, algorithmic traffic traffic scraping data, hijacked MAIDs from devices we haven’t used in years, and so many other sources.

But can this be prevented? Is it really their fault? In a single word; yes. Companies like Meta and Google have what are called device graphs. These graphs track the signal data from virtually every mobile ad ID that uses any of their tools, softwares and platforms. That’s basically every mobile ad ID in the world.

While the ebb and flow of fake traffic evolves and changes, the vast majority of it can be rooted out by these device graphs. It would be a fairly easy lift for big tech and big social to police fake traffic like bots, but they CHOOSE not to. Instead, they convince the world that the AI tools will solve everything by better selecting the MAIDs, of the smaller percentage that are real, to serve your ads to. Here are some ways you have likely seen bots make themselves obvious:

1. Ever get a friend request from someone you’re already friends with?
2. If you run or own a business page that runs ads, you’ve gotten the “your page is scheduled for deletion” or “your ad violates our policies” fraudulent message. That’s a bot.
3. If you run ads and you get form fill leads, you know that most of them, when contacted, have never heard of your company and have NO idea what you’re talking about. That’s evidence of a MAID attributed to a profile erroneously. That is your old phone you turned in so you could upgrade and even though the new owner logged into facebook with it, Meta keeps serving it ads as though it’s both the new and the previous owner.
4. Ever get messages from a profile on Instagram offering free products, or just a random odd message? Then you go to their profile, and it has 0-3 pictures. This is an account created for bot engagement.
5. What about the mass group messages you get added to on Instagram with 1,000 people you don’t know? These are also bot accounts.
6. Lastly, getting comments on your Facebook or Instagram post, that makes absolutely zero sense pertaining to your post, and you click on their profile and it was created that day… also a bot. These profiles are being farmed out on the daily!

Honestly the list could go on, and you see it in your day to day on your social accounts, just not knowing how this could possibly pertain to your marketing dollars being wasted.

Why would they do that?

Aside from the obvious aggregate growth in the volume of MAIDs they can bill us to serve ads to, there is a much more nefarious and acute reason they refuse to better police fake traffic. Over the last few years, this market has grown exponentially. It was 250 billion just a few years ago and likely eclipsed 650 billion last year, in 2024. With that rise in demand, these platforms made the decision that deploying that volume of ads to organic users might make the platform untenable. Meaning that users would be served far too many ads and that increase would likely slow their use of the platforms.

And in their defense, they may very well be right. But they have choices. They have other options than delivering fraud to advertisers. They could structure costs with transparency and let advertisers pay a higher CPM for fully organic traffic or pay a lower cost for AI driven campaigns that seed in bot traffic. That is just one example but they have 100 other choices they can make and they choose fraud. They decided agencies would likely be the people most likely to realize the fraud and the least likely to notify the end users and brands whose money is being wasted. They think agency self preservation will take precedence over transparency, honesty and integrity within the agency an adtech space. So far, they are right.

This far, the vast majority of agencies have remained willfully ignorant or have bought into partial solutions that only solve a small part of the problem and only part of the time. That’s what the AI solutions all offer. The ability to parse traffic on your site into real and organic. But that traffic comes AFTER the waste has already occurred. You’ve already spent the ad dollars to drive the traffic at that point, so the budget has been wasted. Other agencies simply haven’t improved their core understanding of the tech we all use to reach the audiences we need and instead, have convinced the world “better ads” are the solution.

While we should always seek to improve ads and content, the lift we get from doing so will never equal to the amount fraud we are asked to overcome. It’s a lazy way to claim being a tech geek while never having any accountability for the usability and/or success of the tech itself. As though it’s some type of third-party tool kit that doesn’t matter that much. These agencies are far more common than you may think. And they perfectly embody the reason we so soundly advocate for a hybrid model that leverages both marketing and brand minds at the same table with the tech experts. But that’s a conversation for another day…

The right thing to do

I am calling on Big Tech and Big Social to deliver transparency to advertisers. Provide choices that acknowledge your reality, your need to grow and monetize, and account for the economic realities, but that also deliver honesty for advertisers and marketers. If you don’t do this, you make marketers dumber by the year. You fundamentally change what success looks like in marketing by dumbing it down. Brands need to really connect with their markets and customers, and they cannot do that if their campaign analytics are fairytales. Even at adjusted costs offering choices, these platforms will still be very profitable for us AND give us accurate data to inform our teams and agencies on how to better connect to audiences.

The analytics we get from their platforms are invaluable tools that help inform us how to produce better marketing for consumers and brands alike. The analytics we get now are garbage because they are wrought with fake bots, fake clicks, fake form fills and the like. None of it informs anything because none of it reveals the true sentiment from the markets we seek to engage when organic behavior is nestled in a sea of fake behavior.

You can do better. You must do better. I suspect your days are numbered if you choose not to do better. I can go into depth and tell you all about how we have solved the problem, but the point of this article is not pitching Specificity but to inform an industry that change usually only comes when that industry demands it. We need to demand this change together. If we do not demand change as an industry, we fail the brands that have entrusted us to navigate the landscape for them.