The Tokyo District Court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa seeking the removal of impersonation scam ads from Instagram and Facebook, declining to order operator Meta or its Japanese subsidiary to act or to pay damages.
Maezawa deliberately limited his damages claim to ¥1, his side said, to establish what responsibility social media operators bear for such ads. The court ordered no compensation at all.
According to the National Police Agency, so-called SNS investment fraud — con artists posing as celebrities to extract money for investments or fees — cost victims ¥128.8 billion in 2025.
Maezawa's side argued that the only fundamental fix is to stop celebrities from being used in scam ads without their consent.
The ads and the complaint
According to the complaint, scam ads inviting investment began appearing on Instagram and Facebook using Maezawa's name and photographs without permission by around June 2023 at the latest.
When Maezawa's side asked Meta in August 2023 to take the ads down, the company replied that it was working to resolve the problem, according to the complaint. The ads continued.
Maezawa sued in May 2024, arguing that the ads infringed his portrait rights and his publicity rights — the right to exclusively profit from his name and image.
Meta's defense
Meta countered that the people chiefly responsible for the scam ads were unidentified posters. The company argued it had no obligation to find and delete such ads. It also said image-recognition technology at the time could not have identified them with certainty.
The Yokohama District Court reached the same conclusion in a separate suit over scam ads left on Meta's platforms, dismissing that claim on Oct. 15.