[dternyak]

I don't think this analogy holds. In the Madoff example, returns were quite literally only on paper, as they were fabricated out of thin air.

As someone who runs ads on Facebook, I can tell you that we saw an immediate lift in revenue and profitability as soon as we started. Internally we actually believe Facebook is misattributing Facebook driven purchases to the low side, as various ad blocking tools like uBlock may be interfering with this attribution matching.

For the Madoff analogy to hold, Facebook would have be going to our site and making just enough purchases to convince us to continue to run ads on Facebook.

From the view of the business, I couldn't care less of how many fake accounts are on Facebook. As long as money in < money out, we're going to keep running ads on Facebook.