Imagine checking your inbox and finding message after message from elderly strangers who are convinced you sold them a cure for diabetes. That is Mark Cuban’s reality, and it happens every single week. “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. There’s just one problem: Cuban has never made, sold, or endorsed any diabetes cure. The ads those people saw were deepfakes, built using an AI copy of his face and voice. They show him seemingly speaking directly to camera, pitching a miracle product with all the confidence and charm that made him a star on Shark Tank. But none of it is real. The scammers have weaponized his identity to steal money from people who trusted him. And what makes Cuban angriest is that he believes the platform knows exactly what is happening. “Facebook knows the little old ladies are getting ripped off,” he said, and he called the company “the worst of the worst.” It’s one thing for a random internet scam to exist; it’s another for the largest social media company in the world to keep cashing the checks while the victims bleed.
Cuban explained that some of the ads even contain a small disclaimer acknowledging that the person on screen is AI-generated and that the clip is meant as entertainment. But by the time anyone sees that fine print, the pitch has already worked. The familiar voice has already made its impression. The image of a wealthy, successful businessman has already planted a seed of trust in a vulnerable mind. “And to Facebook, that’s good enough,” Cuban said. Think about what that means. A disclaimer buried at the bottom of an ad doesn’t protect anyone; it protects the platform from responsibility. It lets the algorithm keep running, keeps the ad dollars flowing, and keeps the scammers in business. Cuban didn’t hold back. “The point is, that defines the culture of the organization,” he said. A company that lets scammers go after people’s grandparents, he argued, has shown what it will tolerate at every level. There is a bitter irony here. Cuban does actually run a drug company. He co-founded Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that sells low-cost generic medications and tries to make healthcare more affordable. So scammers are using the face of a legitimate drug company founder to sell fake cures. They are borrowing his credibility, his reputation, and his history of trying to lower drug prices, all to pocket hundreds of dollars from senior citizens who are desperate for relief.
The situation becomes even more disturbing when you look at what Meta’s own internal documents reportedly show. On November 6, 2025, Reuters reported on internal Meta documents revealing that the company expected roughly $16 billion, or about 10 percent of its 2024 revenue, to come from ads pushing scams and prohibited products. Not a few bad apples. Not a minor oversight. Ten percent of one of the most profitable companies in the world, built on ads that are associated with fraud. By Meta’s own internal count, users across its apps were seeing some 15 billion “higher risk” ads every single day, which are ads with obvious markers of being scams. One late 2024 document valued that category at about $7 billion a year. In a May 2025 presentation, Meta’s own safety staff estimated that the company’s platforms play a part in a third of all scams that succeed in the United States. That is not a random activist making a wild accusation. That is Meta’s own team, doing its own math, looking at its own data. And yet the system remains deliberately porous. The documents reportedly say that before Meta bans an advertiser, its automated systems must determine that the account is at least 95 percent likely to be running a scam. Below that threshold, the suspected scammer simply pays more per ad and stays live. So a fraudster can be 94 percent likely to be running a scam, and Meta will let them keep advertising. They just have to pay a little extra.
Meta’s response, of course, was defensive. Spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that the documents “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams” and called the company’s 10 percent estimate “rough and overly-inclusive.” He also noted that complaints from users about scam ads had fallen 58 percent over the prior 18 months and that the company had removed more than 134 million scam ads in 2025. That sounds good until you consider the scale: 15 billion higher-risk ads per day, and 134 million removed in an entire year. That’s not a cleanup; that’s a mop in a flood. The same documents reportedly note that the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into Meta over advertising tied to financial fraud, which adds a layer of legal accountability that could be significant. Meanwhile, Meta’s newest AI product has been causing headaches of its own, which makes the whole situation feel almost absurd. A Toronto man decided to let Meta’s AI agent run his Facebook Marketplace listings on September 26. Instead of managing things responsibly, the AI 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 had picked, but the damage was done. It was a small, almost comical breach compared to the serious fraud happening on the platform, but it reveals the same underlying truth: Meta’s AI tools are being deployed faster than they can be understood, and the people who pay the price are often the ones who trust the system the most.
The human toll behind all these numbers is devastating. Older Americans lose more to cybercrime than any other age group. People 60 and older told the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center that they lost $7.7 billion in 2025, across 201,266 complaints, according to the bureau’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. That is 59 percent more money than the year before. Investment schemes did the worst damage, accounting for $3.5 billion in losses, while tech and customer support scams took another $1.04 billion. AI showed up in more than 3,100 of those complaints, and together those victims lost over $352 million. And those numbers only reflect the people who actually spoke up. Plenty of victims never file a report at all. They feel embarrassed. They don’t know who to tell. They worry their families will think they are losing their minds. So they quietly absorb the loss and move on. The scale of the problem is hard to wrap your head around: billions of dollars, every year, flowing out of the pockets of grandparents and great-grandparents into the accounts of professional fraudsters. And now, with AI, those fraudsters can put a familiar face on their lies. They can make a beloved television personality appear to endorse a diabetes cure, a miracle investment, a free government grant, or anything else. For an older person sitting alone at home, seeing that face can feel like a personal recommendation. It is not just a scam; it is a betrayal of trust, engineered at scale.
So what can you do about it? First, adopt a simple rule: anytime you see a famous face advertising something in your feed, assume it’s fake, even if the face is Mark Cuban’s. Run the product’s name through a search engine with the word “scam” next to it. You will likely find warnings, forum posts, and news articles about it. Then think about who in your family is on Facebook the most. Is it your dad? Your grandmother? Your aunt? Send them a message right now, today, warning them that these ads exist. Tell them that Mark Cuban is not selling a diabetes cure, that Jeff Bezos is not giving away money, that Elon Musk is not doubling crypto deposits. The simplest thing you can do is talk to the people you love before scammers do. 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, but it can only chase money it knows about. Reporting matters. It is not just a formality; it is how law enforcement connects the dots, identifies patterns, and builds cases against the people behind these operations. In a world where deepfakes are getting more convincing and platforms are doing too little to stop them, personal vigilance is one of the few defenses we have left. Mark Cuban’s inbox is a warning to all of us. These scams are not going away, and they are only getting smarter. The least we can do is look out for the people who spent their lives looking out for us. If your father mentions a miracle cure, ask questions. If your mother gets a call from a “representative,” hang up. If you see a deepfake ad, report it. Because behind every statistic is a real person, and behind every fake video is a real victim who just needed someone to protect them.