The Hidden Game: How Scammers Use ‘Chameleon Ads’ to Bypass Meta’s Moderation

Social Media Lab investigated fraudulent Facebook and Instagram advertising in the days before Canada’s 2025 federal election. The ads impersonated Canadian politicians and news organizations, using deepfakes and counterfeit news pages to direct users to cryptocurrency and instant-wealth scams.

The Lab identified a specific evasion tactic it called ‘Chameleon ads’. Advertisers submitted benign creative—such as images of running shoes—for approval, then replaced the approved images, text or links with scam material. Campaigns could be run in short bursts, paused and reverted to the harmless version, leaving a reviewer responding to a victim report with an apparently innocuous advertisement. One observed campaign cycled six creative variants and was active for only 22 hours in intermittent periods.

The investigation argues that Meta’s lack of durable archives for ordinary marketing ads compounds the moderation failure: once deceptive ads and their associated pages are removed, researchers and regulators may lose the evidence needed to reconstruct the campaign. It calls for preservation and transparency across all ad types, not only advertisements classified as political or issue-based.