Lottie Weaver was scrolling on TikTok in fall of 2025 when an ad stopped her cold. Aerie, the underwear brand whose pajamas she loved, appeared to be offering a massive sale, with PJs that normally cost upwards of $80 marked down to just $6. Weaver decided to get an early start on her Christmas shopping and bought $40 of discounted pajamas. She was so excited about the deal that she reposted the link to the sale site to her 700,000 Instagram followers.

A month or so passed, and nothing showed up at her home in Queen Creek, Arizona. Weaver, who has more than 3 million TikTok followers, checked her credit card. She hadn’t bought anything from Aerie at all. Instead, she’d been duped by a popular scam on TikTok.

Later that year, she picked up a $400 Ralph Lauren “Polo Bear” sweater for just $40 via another TikTok ad. It never arrived either. And she’s not alone.

“When I posted my video on TikTok, everyone was like, ‘That happened to me!’,” Weaver, 32, told Forbes. “Or it wasn’t Aerie, but it was another brand. They’re going around scamming all kinds of people.”

The scheme is simple: Ads impersonate popular brands, route shoppers to slick external sites, take their money and never deliver.

Until recently, running scams like these was enough to get an advertiser permanently banned from TikTok. Not anymore. Last fall, around the same time that Weaver was duped, the Chinese-run social media giant quietly gutted the rules it used to police advertisers, according to four TikTok insiders and internal documents viewed by Forbes.

Executives slashed the number of violations for which a TikTok advertiser could be immediately banned by more than half, from 37 down to 13, according to policy documents detailing this change. Running so-called “non delivery” scams like the one that Weaver fell for is no longer considered severe enough to merit a suspension. Neither is selling weapons, sketchy financial investments, weight-loss miracle products, fake GLP-1 drugs and pro-eating disorder material. The documents showed a vast relaxing of policy that for years had protected consumers from fraud and harm.

The change left TikTok staffers charged with keeping harmful content off the platform hamstrung. Soon after, internal data showed a massive spike in fraudulent and forbidden sexual content, like prostitution and explicit imagery, on the site. Upwards of 100,000 new advertisers a day that previously would have been immediately banned were instead allowed to remain.

Moderators can take action if users report financial fraud, like pig butchering or investment scams. But non-delivery scams aren’t included in the company’s anti-fraud policies, per the documents and one source.

“We can’t do anything about it. We have to idly sit by and continue to watch people get scammed and get their........

© Forbes