Meta’s $2 Billion AI Acquisition Is Now Running Get-Rich-Quick Scam Ads

Meta dropped $2 billion on an AI company called Manus last year. Now that company is running ads that look suspiciously like the kind of get-rich-quick schemes you’d see at 3 AM on late-night cable.

The pitch is simple and frankly, a little gross: Find local businesses that don’t have websites (or have terrible ones), use Manus’s AI to build them a shiny new site, then cold-call those businesses and sell it back to them. Easy money, they claim.

As part of this campaign, Manus was paying content creators to build out Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts that promoted the AI tool as an easy, lucrative side hustle. The creators’ TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge started asking questions. Funny how that works.

Some of those videos also appeared as official ads for Manus, but the posts on the paid creator accounts themselves often obscured their ties to the company. That’s the kind of disclosure problem that gets platforms and advertisers in regulatory hot water.

I’ve seen this playbook before. It’s the same grift that’s been around since the early days of web hosting resellers and domain flipping, just with an AI veneer slapped on top. The promise of “easy money” is almost always a red flag. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it, and Manus wouldn’t need to pay creators to hype it up.

What’s particularly frustrating is that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is letting this run on its own platforms. You’d think after all the scandals around misinformation and deceptive advertising, they’d have better filters for this kind of thing. But apparently, the ad dollars speak louder than the stench.

The timing is also interesting. AI companies are desperate to show real-world use cases and revenue streams. Manus’s approach suggests they’re struggling to find legitimate, sustainable demand for their product, so they’re pivoting to a model that preys on small business owners who might not know better.

If you’re a local business owner and someone calls you offering to sell you a website they built with AI, run. If you’re a creator thinking about promoting this kind of scheme, remember that your accounts can disappear the moment a journalist makes a phone call. And if you’re Meta, maybe take a harder look at who’s buying your ads before the regulators come knocking.

The full story has more details at The Verge, but the takeaway here is clear: just because it’s AI doesn’t mean it’s not a scam.