This is one outlet's own report from Fortune — the article as it was filed.
AIPROPX ReportFortune · 2h ago
Temu spent up to $962 million on ads that helped finance an army of fake creators on Meta platforms, research claims
If you are one of Ya Lili’s 183,000 followers on her “@findgadgetswithme” Instagram account , you may have seen this video she posted recently: A man stands on a sunny beach, dressed only in swim shorts, his back covered in dirt. “This won’t come off!” he shouts as he rubs futilely at the brown filth covering his arm. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a fully dressed woman walks into the frame and says, “Because you’re doing it wrong!” She then takes a bath mitt and wipes away a large swathe of the soil. “If you’re still using your bare hands, you are missing out,” the voiceover says, as the action switches to a close-up of a woman using the sponge glove to clean a series of inexplicable squiggly lines from her bare thighs. It’s AI slop, obviously. But if you want to buy this shower scrubber, there’s a link under the video where you can find them for sale on Temu.
Ya Lily is the top creator for Temu’s partnership ads on Meta platforms in the U.K. and Europe, according to research seen by Fortune . The problem is, Ya Lily almost certainly does not exist. She’s a fake account.
In fact, of the top 100 creators boosted by Temu’s partnership ads, 73 are likely fakes, the research suggests.
It is not clear whether Temu is doing this deliberately or is being fooled by scammers into spending money on influencers who don’t exist. But the likely fake accounts potentially set up a legal quagmire for Temu, as European law bars the use of misleading formats for advertising.
Neither Temu nor Ya Lilly responded to multiple requests for comment from Fortune . Meta declined comment when reached.
Above: One of YaLily’s Temu partnership ads on Instagram.
Real money going to fake accounts
Ya Lily has a further 129,000 followers on Facebook , where she goes by a completely different name, “Must good.” That page gives her location as “England, Birmingham, MO, United States.” Her bio says “You are my dream of dead.” And her email address appears to be Chinese.
And yet her posts—which all contain links to a random assortment of Temu products—were boosted by Temu and seen more than 1 billion times across both platforms in 16 months ending in April 2026, according to Online Risk Labs. ORL is an independent non-profit based in the Czech Republic, which researches cybersecurity and systemic risk online.
Ya Lily’s content ran in nearly 109,541 Temu ad campaigns in that period, the data show. That’s about 225 campaigns per day.
Using creators on Facebook and Instagram to churn out an endless stream of low-effort AI promotions is one of Temu’s main ways to reach people on social media, ORL’s data suggest. Temu spent as much as $962 million on ads like these in the period, in the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries, according to ORL.
Its estimate is based on total impressions and average cost per reach. The group estimates that in any given quarter Temu alone forms nearly 2% of all the revenue Meta earns from the continent.
Fortune asked two experts in social media advertising to check ORL’s data and estimates. Both found them plausible.
The ORL data focuses only on the U.K. and Europe because the Digital Services Act, which covers those countries, requires large platform providers to publish a public library of all the ads they run, allowing researchers to identify trends or problematic commercial behavior. No such database exists for the U.S.
“Among the top 100 influencers collaborating with Temu, there are certainly some real people among them. In my estimate, however, they account for no more than 15–20%. By contrast, I have serious doubts about the authenticity of accounts that, according to the platform, are based in Russia, China, or Iran,” ORL’s manager, Vendula Prokůpková, told Fortune .
Legally questionable
That could raise legal issues, according to Stuart Lester, the partner who leads law firm Mishcon de Reya’s advertising and marketing group, in London.
“By all means utilize Facebook and Instagram and influencers, but know that there are rules that you have to abide by, and you certainly can’t be creating fake accounts and portraying these as real individuals. That’s misleading on many levels.”
There are several laws and regulatory agencies that might see the use of fake accounts—by scammers, advertisers, or even their mere existence on Meta’s platforms—as potentially infringing the law. In the U.K., the Digital Markets, Competition & Consumers Act of 2024 bans advertising that is misleading. The European Parliament recently passed the new E.U. AI Act, which requires publishers of AI-generated content to label it transparently .
Creating a fake account to carry advertising is likely to be a breach of regulations in multiple European jurisdictions, Lester told Fortune . “That will be misleading. I would say, certainly, in the U.K. and I strongly suspect in the E.U. as well.”
A $10 billion business for Meta
Partnership ads like Ya Lily’s work by allowing creators to enable their posts to be used as ads if they recommend a brand and include a link where viewers can buy the product. If a marketer like Temu approves of the post, it can spend money on it as if it were an ad, and boost it in Meta’s algorithms. The creator gets paid either via a contractual agreement or a cut of sales generated.
Meta booked $10 billion in revenues from partnership ads in Q1 2026. Its total revenue was $56.3 billion—meaning that partnership ads were about 17% of its entire revenue. The company did not give an update on the partnership numbers for Q2, in which Meta disclosed $60.8 billion in revenue overall.
Within that $10 billion-plus partnership ad segment, Temu’s presence is huge.
Between January 2025 and April 2026, there were 31 official Temu pages on Meta and they ran over 9 million ads across the E.U. and the ...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.
