China's biggest online shopping store in Europe paid $962M to fake influencers

NEW: Temu allegedly spent close to $1bn on Meta advertising across Europe using fake influencer accounts, according to new research.

Temu allegedly paid 962 million dollars for ads run through fake influencer accounts. Almost a billion, on people who don't exist.

This is new research into China's biggest online shopping platform in Europe, and the claim is that the money flowed through Meta's ad machine, across European markets, using influencer accounts that weren't real influencers at all. You've seen the ads. Everyone in Europe has seen the ads. Turns out the friendly face telling you about a nine dollar air fryer may have been nobody.

And Meta took the money. That's the part I keep coming back to. A near billion dollar spend from a single advertiser, running through fake accounts, on a platform that swears it polices exactly this. Either the checks failed at industrial scale, or nobody was terribly keen to look.

Brussels has been circling Temu for a while. A 962 million dollar receipt is the kind of thing regulators frame and hang on the wall.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.