Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta allegedly deleted crucial evidence in a landmark US lawsuit brought by mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, who says the tech giant’s advertising systems helped criminals loot Australians’ savings at industrial scale.
The US civil case is the highest-profile legal challenge to date to the way Meta’s advertising machine handles scam 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 having his face used on fraudulent crypto ads on Facebook and Instagram, which were allegedly used to lure ordinary Australians into handing over their savings to criminals.
Forrest’s legal team argues that Meta is not merely a passive bulletin board for fraudsters, but that its automated, AI-driven ad tools – such as its “Advantage+” system – actively generate and amplify scam content. Advertisers supply basic text, images and video, they say, and Meta’s software then rewrites headlines, highlights key phrases, crops and augments images and selects thumbnails using generative AI to make the pitches more enticing, before its targeting systems push those ads at users most likely to click – including vulnerable investors in Australia.
In US legal filings viewed by this masthead, Forrest accuses Meta of ruining ad data crucial to the case by failing to preserve any final versions of nearly 30,000 scam ads that misused his name and image, despite being sent a letter in August 2019 warning of impending litigation and demanding it “preserve all data about the advertisements”.
Forrest’s claims carry echoes of one of Australia’s most notorious document destruction scandals. In 2002, Victorian Supreme Court judge Geoffrey Eames found that law firm Clayton Utz and client British American Tobacco had systematically destroyed thousands of scientific documents to deny dying cancer patient Rolah McCabe a fair trial – a finding that, while overturned on appeal, led to law reform and a reckoning over corporate evidence destruction.
Meta plans to argue that Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act — which shields platforms from liability for third-party content — protects it from Forrest’s claims.
But Forrest’s lawyers say Meta let key databases keep auto‑deleting and now can’t show what the scam ads actually looked like on screen, or exactly how its systems changed the original ad material before people saw it.
Without that data, Forrest says, he cannot rebut Meta’s argument that anything unlawful came solely from rogue advertisers.
AP
Forrest is asking US District Judge P. Casey Pitts to find Meta violated federal evidence preservation rules and to impose sanctions that would effectively sink its Section 230 defence. He wants the judge to find sufficient doubt about Meta’s claim to legal immunity that a jury must decide it; to stop Meta arguing that gaps in the record are Forrest’s problem; and to tell jurors they can assume Meta’s ad tools were switched on and working at full power on the scam ads for which the detailed data is now missing.
In a February 24 hearing, fellow judge Virginia DeMarchi ordered Meta to explain what, if any, fraud or scam review it carries out after an advertiser hits “publish” but before it is delivered users. The judge also ordered Meta to explain any internal “scoring” it uses to rate the likelihood an advertisement breaches its own scam policies, and to report back on what it has produced.
Meta denies wrongdoing and has been granted extra time to respond. A hearing has been set for April 16. The company also told the court it has acted diligently in discovery and pushed back on Forrest’s spoliation claims, saying it does not routinely store every final ad impression and that some of the data he wants either had not existed in the form he describes or was unduly burdensome to retrieve.
Roughly one-tenth of Meta’s total revenue comes from scam ads and banned goods, according to internal documents reported by Reuters in November 2025. They showed Meta projected it would earn roughly $US16 billion ($22.6 billion) in 2024 – about 10 per cent of its annual revenue – from ads for scams and banned goods, with one internal slide estimating the company was serving users 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads every day across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta has called the figures “rough and overly inclusive”, saying the analysis was done to justify planned integrity investments.
Australians lost more than $2 billion to scams in 2024 according to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s combined data. Globally, losses topped $1.4 trillion according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.
Australia’s competition watchdog the ACCC is running 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 bogus crypto investments. That case is still before the courts.
Meta and Forrest were contacted for comment. The case continues.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.