When the Dutch billionaire Television producer John de Mol sued Facebook in 2019 over its alleged failure to stop fraudsters from using his image in misleading ads. The social media company sent Rob Leathern to Amsterdam to meet with the Del Mol team and speak to the media.
“Those spreading these types of ads are persistent, well-funded, and continue to develop their deceptive tactics to bypass our systems” – Leathern he said Reuters at the time.
During his four years at the company now known as Meta, Leathern was in many ways the public face of its efforts to combat misleading advertising. He led the Business Integrity Unit, which was tasked with preventing the abuse of Meta’s advertising products by fraudsters and other bad actors. He regularly spoke to the media about misleading advertising. Leathern also oversaw transparency efforts such as the Meta Ad Library, the industry’s first free, searchable digital advertising repository, and the introduction of identity verification for political advertisers.
But since leaving Meta in delayed 2020, Leathern has watched criminals deploy deepfakes and apply artificial intelligence to create more convincing scams. He said he became concerned because the major platforms had failed to invest in teams and technology at the pace needed to combat such exploitative advertising.
“Technology and progress have stagnated over the last five years,” Leathern said in an interview. “I also feel like we don’t really know how bad it’s gotten or what the current state is. We have no objective ways to find out.”
To launch the project, Leathern partnered with Rob Goldman, former vice president of advertising for Meta CollectiveMetrics.orga non-profit organization that aims to raise the transparency of digital advertising to combat misleading advertising. The goal is to apply data and analytics to measure factors such as the incidence of online ad fraud, as well as uncover murky advertising systems that generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for companies like Meta.
Their effort comes at a time when fraud losses have skyrocketed around the world. Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a fraud research organization whose advisory board includes leaders from Meta, Google and other platforms, estimates that victims collectively lost at least a trillion dollars last year. The global state of fraud in 2025 report found that 23 percent of people lost money to fraud.
The report pointed out that many victims do not report fraud due to shame or not knowing who to tell. Of those who reported fraud, more than a third said that “the platform took no action after reporting the fraud.”