China-Linked Scams on Meta Are a Component of the CCP’s Asymmetric Warfare

Udumbara Udumbara
Dec 23, 2025 - 10:56 Updated: Dec 23, 2025 - 10:47
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China-Linked Scams on Meta Are a Component of the CCP’s Asymmetric Warfare

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Commentary

Meta’s recent China-financial-scam scandal is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) asymmetric warfare strategy against the United States, designed to defeat the enemy without firing a shot.

An investigation has revealed that Meta earns billions of dollars annually from advertising tied to scams, illegal gambling, pornography, and other prohibited activities, with a particularly large share coming from Chinese advertisers.

According to a Dec. 15 Reuters report, Meta generated about $18 billion in ad revenue from China in 2024. Internal documents suggested that roughly $3 billion of that revenue—approximately 19 percent of China-related income—was linked to fraudulent or banned content. China was internally labeled Meta’s top “scam exporting nation,” responsible for a quarter of scam and prohibited ads worldwide across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are banned in China, as is TikTok, despite its close ties to the regime. Chinese companies can still advertise to foreign audiences despite the domestic ban, and this business now accounts for about 11 percent of Meta’s global revenue.

Chinese citizens cannot be victimized on Meta platforms, while Chinese operators can target global consumers with minimal constraints. China captures approximately $18 billion in advertising benefits from Meta without bearing the platform risks imposed on Western users. This arrangement reflects asymmetric warfare, a strategy in which a less powerful or constrained actor exploits the structural vulnerabilities of a stronger opponent through nontraditional means.

Asymmetric warfare extends beyond conventional military conflict across multiple domains, including economic, financial, cyber, and information domains, focusing on systemic weaknesses rather than direct confrontation.

In economic asymmetric warfare, wealth is extracted, markets are manipulated, and trade relationships are weaponized to achieve strategic objectives without going to war. The Meta scam operation fits this model. Chinese-linked actors use the platform to extract tens of billions of dollars from American consumers, effectively turning an American corporation into the vehicle for large-scale wealth transfer out of the United States.

China’s 1999 military doctrine “Unrestricted Warfare,” authored by People’s Liberation Army Senior Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, advocates defeating technologically superior adversaries through non-military means, including financial warfare, economic coercion, and network attacks or cyber warfare.

The doctrine argues that through unrestricted and asymmetric methods, even a relatively weak state can incapacitate a far more powerful opponent. North Korea provides a clear example: despite its small population, weak economy, and inability to match the United States militarily, it has repeatedly inflicted damage through cyberattacks targeting U.S. institutions and infrastructure.

Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, has described “Unrestricted Warfare” as central to understanding Chinese strategy, stating that China has been engaged in economic warfare against the United States for the past 20 to 25 years. One recent manifestation of this approach, beyond the Meta advertising scandal, is the expansion of Southeast Asian scam compounds that increasingly target American victims.

These China-linked scam operations are now aimed primarily at Americans and are causing multibillion-dollar losses. The FBI estimates that American losses amount to about $9 billion to $10 billion per year. These scams operate at an industrial scale through text messages, social media, dating apps, and job platforms, and are often connected to transnational criminal syndicates involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.
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Men and women rescued from cyber scam compounds sit inside a camp belonging to the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army in Kyaukhat, Burma (Myanmar), on April 13, 2025. AP Photo
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The asymmetric nature of the scam centers as a weapon became evident in 2023, when Chinese citizens were victimized. Beijing responded aggressively, enlisting ethnic armed organizations involved in Burma’s (Myanmar) civil war to target territories hosting scam centers that had targeted Chinese nationals. By 2024, Chinese authorities had taken custody of several Chinese operators running scam networks, deployed senior police officials across borders, and carried out systematic crackdowns on compounds holding Chinese workers.

When scam operations target Western victims, Beijing has taken a different approach. China continues to provide diplomatic and economic support for the Burmese junta, which protects many of these scam centers and maintains Belt and Road investments in regions where the compounds operate. Beijing has also awarded medals to Burmese officials nominally engaged in anti-scam efforts.

While the Meta scams and Burma scam centers are nominally private, the links back to the Chinese Communist Party are not distant. These operations rely on Chinese payment processing systems, telecommunications networks, language platforms, and banking channels.

Under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, all Chinese citizens and companies are required to provide assistance to state intelligence agencies upon request. Each scam interaction collects financial vulnerability data, behavioral patterns, personal information, and social network mappings.

To combat Southeast Asian scam centers, the U.S. Scam Center Strike Force was launched in late 2025 as a new interagency federal effort led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice. The initiative targets transnational fraud networks—particularly crypto-investment scams originating in Southeast Asia, including Burma and Cambodia—using data analysis, asset seizures, and international cooperation to dismantle criminal enterprises and recover funds. Participating agencies include the FBI, Secret Service, Treasury Department, and State Department, with a focus on freezing assets and disrupting supporting infrastructure tied to digital asset fraud.
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Meanwhile, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate Meta for facilitating and profiting from scams and fraudulent advertising. They cited Meta’s own internal assessments indicating its platforms were involved in roughly one-third of all successful scams in the United States, potentially contributing to more than $50 billion in consumer losses in 2024.

The senators also referenced findings linking Meta platforms to a majority of payment scams and warned that cybercrime groups based in China and Southeast Asia were among the primary beneficiaries. They urged the FTC and SEC to pursue investigations, seek disgorgement of profits, impose civil penalties, hold executives accountable, and require binding reforms.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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