An interesting aspect is that someone could be essentially perpetrating this scam while legitimately being innocent of malevolent intent. I don't know if that's the case in the story recounted above (I suspect not), but I have met a small business that ran a "successful" Facebook ad campaign to get more likes, and who are happy with the result, where I strongly suspect the quality of the likes is really low. They genuinely think they ran a successful ad campaign with good ROI, and I don't think the intent was to puff up their profile. Afaict they haven't used the number for anything either, but it could well lead to unintentionally misrepresenting their popularity to future potential investors/clients/etc.

Of course, this starts to some extent from Facebook: the small businesses reporting their "successful ad campaign" are more or less passing on the low-quality metrics that Facebook gives to them. Some businesses are aware that these metrics are crap, but then Facebook itself is also aware...