Like, share, and beware: Facebook infested with porn and gambling ads

Despite claims it invests a lot in AI bot monitoring, Meta's platforms are actually drowning in sexually explicit ads.

If you’re an occasional Facebook scroller, you may have noticed at least some evidence of dubious content. The kind that perhaps made you question how it is allowed based on Facebook’s Community Guidelines. But an endless influx of AI or bot-generated content is not really the platform’s problem. However, profiting from sponsored ads that go against its own rules is.

Scrolling through Facebook reels I was unpleasantly surprised by a sudden pop-up of full female nudity. “Do you want to see me naked?” the video asked. I believe I already have, but at that point, another thing caught my eye – a sponsored icon. Having worked with Facebook ads before and knowing what strict guidelines they impose, I was amazed at how they even got through.

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to look more into it. What followed was the discovery of a whole array of nudity-featuring or straight-up pornographic ads, pages that lead to other pages, gambling promotions, malware, and a whole lot of Community Guidelines breaches.

But let’s start at the beginning.

How Facebook ads work

From my professional experience, if you want to avoid having your ads taken down or, worse, having your whole account suspended, you must follow a strict set of rules. To run a successful and lasting ad campaign, you must be a somewhat known brand, strictly follow all rules and guidelines, be hyper-sensitive to things that might make people uncomfortable or self-conscious, and, above all, run the ads through an established Facebook account.

For example, you have better luck keeping your ad if the account you posted it from has been active and out of trouble for at least a year. And while the advertiser that mooned me launched in 2023, it’s clear how it doesn’t quite match those same restrictions I used to carefully follow. Meta itself is very clear about rules regarding nudity in ads:

Meta is less strict about regular content that involves some nudity, but the rules regarding ads are very clear. So, how come I came across an increasingly large number of sponsored ads showing nudity, half not even getting removed when reported?

It’s a similar situation with gambling ads. Not only have I found sponsored gambling ads that featured “sexually suggestive” content, but they were also firmly against the rules. All of the ones I have seen, including the ones without any nudity, explicitly show the transfer of funds and supposedly real monetary gain.

Plinko is a fun game that combines math and logic, but in terms of Facebook adverts, Plinko apps are the main culprits for breaking gambling ad rules. The game’s nature makes it popular in the online casinos, and it’s precisely this aspect of Plinko that adverts focus on. Some were already exposed as scams that used fake celebrity endorsements, while also being rigged against the player. And while gambling ads are not banned on Facebook if the advertiser has a permit, due to ads I've seen being shown in a location where permits are not issued, it clearly indicates that Meta rules were broken. Yet, the sponsored ads remain.

Even with regular reporting and Facebook’s own systems eventually taking down the forbidden ads, they come back in waves. Like Hydra – when you cut off one head, ten more pop up in its place. Over a short period of time, ads that featured full nudity or pornography under the keywords “AI girlfriend” and “eraser clothes” rose exponentially, at one point reaching 1900 active campaigns.

I also found some links between nudity and pornography-featuring sponsored ads. They were all launched by seemingly bot accounts, created almost at the same time back in 2023. The majority of them lead to pages like crazybody.online, dizyer.info, and pharmacity.today. And all of them advertised AI clothing eraser apps.

Sex sells: pornographic ads on Facebook

Scrolling through waves of nudity or pornography-featuring ads in the Meta ad library, I had three questions on my mind:

1. Are they using real people’s adult content for these ads?
2. What do they advertise?
3. How do they get money to fund all of these bot campaigns?

With the help of the Cybernews research team, I managed to partially answer the first question, and fully answer the second and third.

AI undressing apps: real people or AI?

Crazybody.online, before its eventual demise on Facebook, lasted a whole week running ads that showed naked women or women whose clothes were “erased” with the help of AI. Dizyer.info, still active during the writing of this article, launched a wide array of ads, ranging from mildly suggestive to fully pornographic content. Interestingly, both of these websites acted as a middle stop before reaching the actual service they advertised – crushai.vip.

CrushAI, available on the web, is a subscription-based AI undressing and chatbot service. While it notes that “all characters and stories on the site are fictional,” its promotional ads featured both real and AI-generated people. In the image below, on the left, is Sophie Rain, an OnlyFans model and social media personality whose content was featured in one of the ads with the slogan “Watch me naked for free.” Our team reached out to her for a comment, but she did not respond. On the right is an entirely AI-generated person, with the video showing how you can “erase her clothes.”

However, I couldn’t find any evidence that CrushAI itself features real people. The pictures shown got flagged as either AI-generated or were edited in a way that real people used would not be recognizable. Of course, even if there is a chance that those are real people’s images, CrushAI openly states that any communication via chatbox is purely fictional.

From AI girlfriends to Malaysian leather belts

While the main culprits of nudity ad campaigns on Facebook – crazybody.online and dizyer.info – promoted crushai.vip, pharmacity.today, whose ads were fully pornographic, led to a perfectly ordinary belt shop. It’s possible that the original page was flagged and the belts were chosen as an innocent substitute, but given how odd the ad itself was, I wouldn’t be so sure this wasn’t the intended sales pitch.

The Pharmacity ad plot was extremely bizarre, too. Starting off innocently, with classic infomercial-style product promotion, this 59-minute ad switched to full pornography, speedrunning acts and poses. Meanwhile, products were showcased below. After this NSFW interruption, the rest of the 50-odd minutes were designated to a podcast-style narration.

Following the money

Facebook sponsored ads are not free. A week-long campaign (about as long as crazybody.online lasted) can cost $300 or more, not to mention the actual website upkeep. CrushAI, albeit slightly old-fashioned, seemed fairly well done. And both crazybody.online and dizyer.info used both Namecheap, for domain name creation, and hosting, like GoDaddy. Besides, most of them using older accounts (created in 2023), point either to a long game or account purchase to run mass ad campaigns. So, how do they pay for it all?

At least when it comes to CrushAI, the service gets money from subscriptions. There are monthly, quarterly, yearly, or lifetime subscription options, costing from $39.90 to $79.90. Paying unblocks the ability to undress pre-existing models, change clothing, upload your own picture to undress, or use a chatbot to have a conversation with fictional models.

The potential dangers

CrushAI has an SSL certificate and shows that the subscription payments go through the Airwallex platform, which is entirely legitimate. However, while the payment transfer seems secure, the process of entering your payment details on the CrushAI page is not entirely safe. According to the VirusTotal results, one vendor for CrushAI was marked as malicious.

Another issue is with undressing apps in general. Because they give the possibility to upload photos without moderating their content, there have been cases of child predators using AI to generate pornography. So, while CrushAI itself is not directly linked to child pornography, both this platform and other AI undressing apps can serve as a way for predators to deep-fake pornographic content, and not just one involving underaged people.

Finally, the very fact that these ads exist opens up ways to expose minors to pornography. Since everyone 13 years and older can create a Facebook account, every ad example shown in this article can reach underaged people, too.

A wider problem

About half of the nudity-featuring ads I reported got taken down. But the more I reported, the lower the success rate of those ads being taken down was. I checked online forums like Reddit to see if anyone else has encountered this issue. Here are some of the posts and comments I’ve seen.

New Scientist conducted a similar investigation and found out that last year alone, Meta allowed sexually explicit ads to run without addressing user reports. And with bots launching hundreds of nudity-featuring ad campaigns daily, new ones popping up when old ones get removed, Facebook is profiting significantly from it. If a week-long ad campaign, like the one of crazybody.online, can cost hundreds of dollars, and there were 1900 active campaigns, it’s not difficult to do the math of how much money Meta is earning from content that shouldn’t even exist according to its own rules.

I reached out to Meta for comment. Their regional representative stated that:

It’s against our policies to run ads that contain adult nudity and sexual activity, and we remove these ads and pages running them when detected, as occurred in this case.

The representative also assured me that the violating ads and pages mentioned have been taken down.

To summarize

Facebook, despite its strict advertising guidelines, is getting absolutely swamped with pornographic and gambling ads. Reporting those is only somewhat effective, as the more you report, the less likely you are to be taken seriously and for the ads to get taken down. Internal systems are occasionally more effective at eventually banning those ad campaigns, but the advertisers themselves often remain and simply switch to other accounts.

And the content shown in those adverts is not just disturbing. In some cases, it shows real people either alone or engaging in sexual acts. Meanwhile, the products they advertise range from physical items, like belts, to AI clothes-erasing apps, which can be used to generate nudity-containing content involving anyone. So, unless Meta becomes stricter with how it handles adverts on its platform, your casual feed or reel-scrolling can soon become very NSFW.