Social media feeds across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have been quietly taken over by a wave of AI-generated Tai Chi advertisements, and the scale of the operation is far larger than most people realize.
Over the past 12 months, an estimated $195 million has reportedly been spent to keep these ads circulating, with more than 16,000 individual creatives flooding the platforms.
The ads follow a recognizable formula. An AI-generated figure, often an older man or woman, delivers breathless promises about what a few minutes of Tai Chi walking can do.
“Running breaks your joints. Tai Chi builds them back. After 50 you need that.” The claims range from dubious to outright unbelievable.
One ad promises that “in 7 days your eyes will change.” Another guarantees visible abs in three weeks. One single ad from this campaign has racked up over 100 million views, with reportedly more than half a million dollars spent running it on YouTube alone.
The company behind many of these ads is MadMuscles, run by Ammoapps Limited, which sits inside a 600-person operation called Ammo, itself owned by Genesis, a Ukrainian holding company whose app portfolio has been downl0aded over 400 million times.
The company is registered in Cyprus, with a billing entity in Las Vegas, which makes accountability across borders genuinely difficult to establish.
Investigative content creator Josh Brett walked through the entire purchase funnel himself to document how it works. After an ad, users are taken through a ten-minute quiz collecting personal details, age, goals, and health concerns.
The quiz recommended Brett follow a 1,040 calorie daily diet to lose 12% body fat at 110 lbs (50 kg), a figure he notes would place him in the underweight range. Before reaching the checkout, a spinning prize wheel awards the “maximum discount,” followed by a countdown timer that simply restarts when it hits zero.
The checkout process layers on multiple add-ons through a sequence of pop-ups, each featuring a small, off-center skip button alongside a large, prominent yes button. Many users, according to reviews, go through the entire sequence believing they have already purchased the product, only to discover they have been charged for several stacked extras. The auto-renewal price is buried in small text.
Canceling requires navigating away from the app entirely, as no cancel button exists within it, and the money-back guarantee requires documented proof of many consecutive completed workouts.
Brett draws a direct comparison to research on why Nigerian scam emails are written so obviously. The answer is that deliberate absurdity acts as a filter. Anyone skeptical enough to recognize the red flags scrolls past for free, costing the advertiser nothing. The people who do not scroll past are precisely the ones the system was built to convert.
Tai Chi is a legitimate martial art, but the evidence does not support the claims being made about it here. Meanwhile, Meta, YouTube, and TikTok all earn revenue each time one of these ads runs, giving platforms limited financial motivation to police them aggressively.
Regulators in different countries have overlapping but incomplete jurisdiction, and fines, when they do come, are often smaller than the revenue generated.
