Meta took down more than a billion fake accounts in the first half of the year, an Oireachtas committee has heard.
Dualta Ó Broin, Head of Public Policy Ireland at Meta, was addressing the Joint Committee on Finance, which is continuing its examination of authorised push payment (APP) fraud.
Mr Ó Broin revealed that Meta - which owns Facebook and Instagram - took down 1.1bn fake accounts in the first sixth months of this year.
He flagged "a particularly adversarial space with bad actors who use increasingly sophisticated means to avoid detection".
But he could not tell the committee how much it had profited from fraudulent advertisements on its sites.
Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty asked how much money Meta has collected from advertisers who had then scammed customers.
Mr Ó Broin conceded that he did not know.
"Your company has never calculated how much revenue that yis are bringing in on fraudulent ads?" the deputy said. "Is there any chance that your company might do that?"
"I don't think that would be something we would do", Mr Ó Broin admitted.
When Deputy Doherty said that Meta could calculate the figures, Mr Ó Broin replied: "Possibly, for the ones we have removed".
But he then repeated that he did not think this was something that Meta would do.
Last year, Google removed 5.2bn advertisements for violating its policies and restricted a further 4.3bn, Ryan Meade, Government Affairs and Public Policy Manager at Googel, said.
This scale of moderation relies on the use of AI (artificial intelligence), he added.
Fianna Fáil TD Jim O'Callaghan asked what was being done to target scams which are being coordinated by sellers.
Head of External Relations for Scam Prevention at Amazon Abigail Bishop said that "everybody who sells on the Amazon store" has to verify their identity including "by showing their face to us".
The verification process is "quite extensive", she insisted, and includes "actually meeting with the sellers face-to-face".
Meta does not confirm the identities of all its advertisers as it engages in "data minimisation", Mr Ó Broin said.
Instead, the company takes "a risk based approach", Meta Head of Public Policy Philip Milton said.
It applies far greater scrutiny to political advertisers than to someone operating a local yoga studio, he noted.
