FTC asks whether ad tools help scammers impersonate real businesses

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the agency is considering whether to update its Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses. The question is whether social media platforms, search engines and other digital marketplaces are helping scammers place impersonation ads, through the same ad-optimization tools those platforms sell to real companies.

The FTC has opened an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, to be published in the Federal Register, asking for public comment on this. It wants to know how much ad-targeting and ad-optimization services contribute to impersonation scams reaching consumers in the first place.

What the numbers show

In 2025, the FTC received more than 1 million reports of imposter scams. Consumers reported losing nearly $3.5 billion to them. Almost 30% of people who lost money to scammers that year said they were first contacted on social media, accounting for $2.1 billion of the losses.

Those figures point to something the rulemaking makes explicit: the scam and the ad system are not separate. A platform's optimization tools do not check whether an advertiser is the real business it claims to be. They are built to find the audience most likely to respond, and they do that job whether the advertiser is legitimate or not. An impersonation ad gets the same targeting engine as a genuine one, which is the mechanism the FTC is now examining.

Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, put it plainly: today's impersonation scams are not isolated con artists working alone. They are operations that run on the identical advertising infrastructure sold to legitimate businesses. The rulemaking asks whether platforms should be required to take concrete steps before an impersonation ad ever reaches a consumer.

Why this matters for detection

Consumers currently rely on dominant platforms for shopping, banking, travel and government services, which means the fraud shows up in the exact channels people already trust. The pattern is not a single fake ad; it is the recurring use of a legitimate targeting system by an illegitimate advertiser, at scale, across a small number of platforms. That is a pattern that can be watched for systematically rather than caught one complaint at a time, which is the kind of recurring signal Flggd tracks.

The FTC's ANPRM is a request for comment, not a rule yet. What it establishes now is that the platforms' own optimization tools are the object of scrutiny, not just the scammers using them.