Temu spent $962 million on influencers, and 73 of the top 100 were likely fake

Ya Lili posted her last video on 7 September

Ya Lili's pitch was a man on a beach, covered in dirt that "won't come off", rescued by a stranger with a bath mitt and a link to Temu under the video ¹. The account had 183,000 Instagram followers, promoted Temu goods with AI-generated images, and ran roughly 225 ad campaigns a day, past a billion impressions in 16 months ¹².

Fortune's investigation↗ ran on 31 August. Five Ya Lili ads lingered on 4 September, likely leftovers of scheduled buys, and she stopped posting entirely on 7 September ³⁴. In any given quarter, by ORL's estimate, Temu alone was nearly 2 percent of Meta's European ad revenue ¹.

€830 million in, eight identities verified

Online Risk Labs, a Czech non-profit, estimates Temu spent €830 million ($962 million) on partnership ads across Facebook and Instagram over the 16 months to April 2026, priced from impressions times average cost per reach ¹³. Of the 100 creators carrying the most Temu ads, ORL assessed 73 as likely fake; eight carried verified identities ¹². Two outside experts reviewed the numbers and found them plausible ¹⁵.

The geography ran against the audience: 28 of the top 100 listed Russia and 19 China, against six in the EU or UK ¹². Behind them sat 12,000-plus accounts, the top hundred alone running 1.4 million campaigns and about 17 billion impressions; one changed its name 15 times ¹².

Temu cut only the channel the researchers flagged

When the story ran, Temu was buying 4,900 partnership campaigns a day↗ ⁴. It then cut exactly the flagged channel: weekly partnership ads fell from 115,114 in the week of 17 August to 64,008 in the week of 7 September, down 44 percent, while total weekly ads slipped from 166,523 to 147,013, down 12 percent ³⁴.

Ninety of the top hundred accounts showed zero Temu advertising by 4 September. Partnership ads stopped almost entirely in Ireland, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Latvia and Slovenia, where misleading-ad penalties can include prison, while spend on creators ORL counts as legitimate appeared to hold ³⁴.

Nobody has proved Temu knew

ORL's data does not establish who created or controlled the accounts, or that Temu knowingly funded them ³⁵. The decline could partly reflect routine campaign expiry or enforcement by Meta ³. One consultant Fortune quoted called the pattern "lazy, not sketchy": industrial-scale AI creator content as an extreme of Chinese social commerce ¹. Temu and Meta both declined to comment ¹⁴.

Brussels taxes the other engine

The collapse has not shown up in demand yet: the three Chinese platforms took 29 percent of French online apparel volume from January to July↗, up from 19 percent a year earlier, and still held 25 percent in July, the tax's first month ⁶.

Brussels taxed the parcels anyway. A €3 duty per product category landed on China-origin imports on 1 July↗ ⁶⁷, and a €2 handling fee follows on 1 November, taking a one-category parcel's levy to €5 ⁸⁹. Temu's French visitors fell 36.4 percent in July, and French officials recorded a 30 to 40 percent drop in imports from the three platforms ⁶.

Who carries the bill

Meta's partnership-ads line hit a $10 billion annual run rate this year↗, roughly double a year earlier, because ads that carry a creator's handle outperform the brand's own ¹⁰. Brussels has already fined Temu $232 million under the Digital Services Act, in a probe that examined its influencer promotion programmes, and ORL has filed its findings with the DSA regulator ¹⁵.

What the ad shutdown did to sales, no published data yet shows.

A creator network you can switch off in a week is not a moat; it is a line item.