Temu ads used 73% fake influencers, research finds
Research suggests 73 of Temu's top 100 Meta creators are fake accounts pushing AI-generated content
A woman appears out of nowhere on a beach, wipes a stranger's dirt-covered arm clean with a bath mitt, and tells viewers they're cleaning themselves wrong. The video has been viewed alongside more than a billion others just like it, and the woman almost certainly doesn't exist.
The creator behind the clip, "Ya Lily", has 183,000 Instagram followers and a further 129,000 on Facebook, where she posts under an entirely different name with a bio reading "You are my dream of dead".
Research shared with Fortune by Online Risk Labs (ORL), a Czech non-profit studying online systemic risk, found her content ran in more than 109,500 Temu ad campaigns over 16 months, roughly 225 a day and was seen over a billion times.
Yeah, Lily isn't an outlier. ORL's analysis of Temu's top 100 Meta creators found 73 are likely fake accounts, with 28 based in Russia and 19 in China despite targeting European audiences.
73% had changed their account handle at least once during the study period; one changed its name 15 times.
Only eight were verified with a real identity. ORL manager Vendula Prokůpková told Fortune she believes genuine creators make up no more than 15–20% of the group.
Stuart Lester, who leads the advertising and marketing group at law firm Mishcon de Reya, said creating fake accounts to carry advertising is "misleading on many levels" and likely breaches both the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act and EU advertising rules.
ORL has filed a report asking the EU's Digital Services Act regulator to formally assess the risk Temu's creator network poses.
The scale is striking: partnership ads made up 65.8% of all Temu's Meta ads in the period, compared with roughly 2% for typical advertisers, and ORL estimates Temu spent up to $962 million on the format across the UK and EU, nearly 2% of Meta's entire European revenue in a given quarter.
