Fortune found that 73 of the top 100 creators used in Temu partnership ads on Meta's platforms in the UK and Europe appear likely to be fake accounts.
Advertisers pay influencers because an audience trusts them. Jim Edwards reported on close to a billion dollars moving through accounts whose followers, locations and even their names may not be real, and on a possibility nobody can rule out: that the buyer and the seller are the same company.
"So an unsolved mystery with all of this is Temu paying these people and this is working for Temu or have all of these accounts been created by Temu because Temu just wants more and more of these because they work and therefore Temu is essentially paying itself."
Edwards is Fortune's global news executive editor, and the story came to him from a source he thinks he first met in 2011, who used to run a social-media marketing platform and brought him the underlying data.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it.
Here are the 9 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Jim Edwards, Fortune's global news executive editor, who reported the investigation into Temu's partnership ads on Meta that this segment walks through
🎙️ Host: Ellie Austin, who anchors Fortune Daily, the magazine's daily video show
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 on YouTube (Fortune Daily)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 25 min
Key Takeaways
Most of the creators promoting Temu on Meta in Europe look like accounts nobody is behind Fortune put it at 73 of the top 100 creators in Temu partnership ads across the UK and Europe
Nobody has established whether Temu is buying these ads or selling them to itself Edwards asked Temu that question directly and got no reply to multiple requests
The tell is not the content of an account but how often it changes its name One account had changed its name 16 times; real influencers keep the name they built
The reason anyone can see this spending is a European transparency law, not a leak Very large platforms must keep a public library of every ad they run; the US has no equivalent
Meta earns from the category and is not the party with a reason to investigate It last disclosed 10 billion a year from partnership advertising and promoted it to investors
A fake creator advertising a real product may not be illegal in the US and may be in Europe European law treats anything false or misleading used to make a sale as the consumer's damage
The harm scales with what the fake account is selling, from jeans to supplements
1. A source with the data
Ellie Austin opened the show on online retail and handed the first segment to Edwards, framing it with Fortune's own numbers before he spoke.
The show's research set the scale of the problem. "In reporting this story, Fortune found that 73 of the top 100 creators used in Temu partnership ads on Meta platforms in the UK and Europe more generally appear likely to be fake accounts." Austin also cited the spending: "Research reviewed by Fortune estimates that Temu spent as much as $962 million on these ads over a 16-month period" She said it is not clear whether Temu knowingly used fake creators or was fooled by scammers, but that the practice could create legal and regulatory questions in Europe
The story came from one long-standing source rather than a document leak. Edwards said he thinks he first met the man in 2011, and that he used to run a social-media marketing platform sold to advertisers as a dashboard sitting on top of Facebook and Twitter
The approach was a pitch with data attached. "And he came to me a few weeks ago and said, I've got some data showing that a huge percentage of partnership ads being run on Meta's platforms are going through fake accounts." Edwards said the source put the funding at close to a billion dollars over a period of six months, a shorter window than the 16 months in Fortune's published figure His response was to ask to see the data and check it himself
2. The fake creator, Ya Lily
Austin asked who the creator profiled in the article is, and whether she exists.
The account has a real audience number attached to a person who probably is not there. "So, Ya Lily is almost certainly a fake account and she has more than 250,000 followers across Facebook and Instagram."
The listed location does not resolve to one place. Edwards said it reads as something like Birmingham, Missouri, United States, somewhere else, and that the account "doesn't seem to understand which Birmingham she might be in"
The contact details point somewhere else entirely. "And her email address is clearly Chinese. It's a Chinese name attached to a Chinese email service."
The account's own writing is the clearest evidence. "And some of the things she writes on her account just do not make sense in English." The bio reads "You are my dream of dead." She also maintains a Facebook page under a different name, Must Good, which Edwards said does not make sense either
Whether the followers are people is a separate open question. Edwards said they may themselves be bots in some form, and that "Maybe we'll never know."
3. How fakeness gets measured
Asked whether anyone can reach a definitive answer, Edwards described the three signals his source's research laboratory scores accounts on.
The first signal is name changes, because a genuine influencer has a brand to protect. "Because real influencers don't change their names. That's their brand." "One of them has changed his name 16 times."
The second is verification. Edwards said very few of these accounts are verified, and that an influencer in good standing on Meta's platforms would be well advised to verify their identity so the platform knows they are a real person
The third is the mismatch between where an account sits and who it sells to. "And some of these accounts are based in Russia and China, but for some reason they're targeting the European market."
4. Cheap ads that might sell
Edwards' own judgment is that the creative is bad. He said the ads are not very good, do not make much sense and are very cheaply put together, and that he does not understand why Temu funds them
He would not assert that they work. "I'm surprised that they get sales results if they get sales results from these ads."
The comparison is what a real partnership ad can do. Edwards said a genuine influencer with a following in a particular space can make these enormously effective, whereas the fake accounts advertise a completely different product every day
One explanation he was given is that this is normal behavior somewhere else. "In China, advertising on social media is like a total wild west." Temu is a Chinese company, and Edwards said the theory is that the practice is more common there and is now being tried in Europe
5. Why Europe is the risk
Austin raised the Digital Services Act and asked whether Temu is setting itself up for legal trouble.
The principle is the same across the jurisdictions, and it is short. "You cannot do something that is false or misleading to make a sale."
Edwards said Europe lives up to its reputation for heavy regulation of advertising and marketing, and that the UK and the EU27 share that basic rule
He put the test as what an in-house lawyer would say. Told that a campaign would push ads through 76 entirely fake accounts, Edwards said a European general counsel would immediately tell the company not to do it, because it could mean trouble with any number of government agencies in Europe or the UK
6. The ad library the US lacks
The evidence exists because European law forces platforms to publish it. Edwards said that in Europe a very large internet platform must maintain a library of all the advertising that ran on it, kept as a public service so people can see where money goes and how influence works on social media That library is Meta's, and it is where the Temu ads were found
The US has no equivalent, which is why he could not answer the question about American law. "But the US does not have an equivalent of the digital services act. So we don't know what advertising on social media looks like in the United States."
7. Who is getting paid
Austin pressed on the money: in a normal partnership the creator gets paid, so where is the financial benefit here.
Edwards explained the mechanism first, using a hypothetical Hermès handbag video. A creator posts the video and tags it as available for a partnership ad. Someone at the brand sees that the creative is available on their own dashboard, and if they like it they can put money behind it and boost it as if it were an ad.
The creator's upside is exposure plus one of two payment routes. Edwards said the creator gets their content and brand in front of more people, and added "I might also get a cut of sales." The alternative is a brand agreement that pays a set amount of cash for a number of posts
The part that makes the fake accounts possible is that no relationship is required. "But the interesting thing is you don't have to have a relationship with any company to try to tempt this company into boosting a piece of your creative." "If I want Temu to pick up my little Temu ad, I can just make it myself and tag them and hope that they like it and give me some money, right?"
Which leaves the question the reporting could not close. "So an unsolved mystery with all of this is Temu paying these people and this is working for Temu or have all of these accounts been created by Temu because Temu just wants more and more of these because they work and therefore Temu is essentially paying itself." "And I approached Temu for comment hoping to ask them that specifically and they didn't reply to multiple requests."
8. Meta has no reason to look
The category is a real business for Meta, not a rounding error. "The last time it disclosed numbers, Meta said that it makes 10 billion a year from this type of advertising." Edwards said most partnership advertising on Meta is genuine, and that the fake-account problem is concentrated in this one advertiser "They touted it to investors on their Q1 earnings call."
He drew the incentive out plainly. With one company putting that kind of money through the system, Edwards said, Meta is not massively financially incentivized to stop them or to check whether real humans are behind the ads
The legal difficulty is that the ads themselves are not lies. "The accounts are fake, but the ads themselves are obviously ads and they are not necessarily false or misleading." A shopper who clicks an ad for jeans and buys them at Temu receives jeans "And so a consumer may not be deceived here even though the character touting the ad is entirely fake."
That is why the exposure sits in Europe rather than the US. Edwards said a US false-advertising suit may not work on this basis because the ad was real and the product was real, while European law treats anything false or misleading used to make a sale as damage the consumer can sue over
9. When the ads get convincing
Austin asked whether these ads need to be stopped or whether they are simply the future of advertising.
Edwards' first reason for caring is that cheap tools change how marketers behave. He said we can expect marketers to act in an increasingly strange and novel way because AI lets them do strange and novel things very cheaply
The disclosure requirement may already be being missed. "In Europe, the law requires you to disclose if something is AI." Edwards said it is not completely clear to him that all of these ads are transparently labeled as AI, and that this will be a problem
The detection advantage is temporary. He said humans are currently fairly good at spotting AI material, but "And we all know that a year from now, two years from now, who knows? AI content will be indistinguishable from reality."
He framed the interest as a public one rather than a consumer one. "And I think the public has an interest in knowing whether they're looking at material that was generated by a human being or just generated randomly by a machine."
The stakes depend entirely on the product. "But the New York Times recently did a big piece on AI wellness influencers and they're driving consumers to buy supplements and all kind of treatments that could have a very real impact on your health." With Temu the purchase under discussion is a pair of jeans, which Edwards called a sliding scale depending on what the ads direct people to buy
Bonus Insights
Austin framed the whole programme around online retail, opening with the line that the day was about "monolithic questionable quality online retail"
The host's own segment after the interview covered Shein's first days as a public company. Austin said "The fast fashion giants shares slid as much as 10% in early Hong Kong trading, falling below its already reduced offer price" "The company is now valued at around $26.3 billion, which is truly a far cry from the much higher valuations it once commanded" She put the open question as whether viral shopping habits make for a durable public company, with regulators, competitors and investors looking harder at the real costs behind very low prices
Austin closed the interview by inviting the subject of it on air: "And Ya Lily, if you're out there and you want to come and give us your side of the story, please get in touch."
The episode carried two further segments, from Fortune's Sebastian Herrera on Apple's new chief executive and from business editor Nick Lichtenberg on Gen Z and blue-collar work. Both are written up separately
Edwards' bottom line is that a near-billion-dollar advertising campaign has been running through accounts nobody can prove belong to anyone, that the only reason the public can see it is a European disclosure law, and that neither the advertiser nor the platform has answered the question of who is being paid.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Temu (The Chinese discount marketplace whose partnership ads Fortune traced to likely-fake creator accounts; it did not reply to multiple requests for comment)
Meta, Facebook and Instagram (The platforms carrying the ads, and the business Edwards says last disclosed 10 billion a year from this advertising category)
Meta Ad Library (The public archive European law requires, and the only reason the campaign could be counted at all)
Hermès (Edwards' hypothetical brand for explaining how a creator tags a post as available for a partnership ad)
Shein (The subject of the host's follow-on segment, whose shares slid as much as 10% below an already reduced offer price on debut)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Temu spent $962 million on Meta partnership ads featuring fake creators – Jim Edwards (Edwards' own Fortune investigation, which this segment walks through)
The EU Digital Services Act (The regulation behind both the ad library and the disclosure duty Edwards says these ads may be failing)
An Amish Avatar and an A.I. Monk Are Pitching Supplements on Social Media (The New York Times reporting on AI wellness influencers that Edwards cited as the higher-stakes version of the same problem)
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