Meta vowed to stop illegal financial ads on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in Britain; and it failed 1,000 times in a week; claims report

Facebook parent Meta reportedly needs to do a better job in fighting fraud. According to a report in Reuters, Meta has repeatedly failed to stop illegal ads for high-risk financial products running on its platforms in Britain.

The report quotes Britain's Financial Conduct Authority that said that the American giant repeatedly failed despite committing to block them. It quotes data from one week in November 2025. Britain's FCA reportedly found that during one week in November, some 1,052 ads for currency trading and certain complex financial instruments were posted on Meta's platforms by advertisers not authorised by the regulator to promote them.

56% of those ads were reportedly from an unspecified number of unauthorised advertisers that the FCA had already flagged to Meta.The regulator claims that it repeated its review of posts on Meta for another week in December and the results were largely the same. In the report FCA said that it again found that a small number of repeat offenders were responsible for the majority of the illegal ads it discovered, the person familiar with the FCA's work said, without giving a breakdown of the number of illegal ads or repeat offenders.

In 2025, FCA warned that people were increasingly being targeted on social media by online trading scams where fraudsters offer currency trades. FCA's review of Meta was reportedly an attempt to see how successful Meta has been at weeding out the rogue ads. The regulator is said to have focused on Meta's platforms -- Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp -- because they carry a disproportionate amount of suspicious financial ads. "Fraud is the most common crime in the UK," an FCA spokesperson told the news agency.

He added that since over half of some scams originating on Meta's platforms, it's vital for the company to step up and use its tools to protect users from scam content.According to the report, Meta seems to have acknowledged the scam on its platforms in internal documents. "Worldwide, billions of users of Meta's platforms have been exposed to ads for fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and banned medical products," says the report quoting internal Meta documents.

Meta on report: FCA misrepresents facts

Asked about the FCA's findings, Ryan Daniels, a spokesperson for Meta, said that the company fights fraud and scams aggressively on a global level and takes swift action on the vast majority of reports within days. "Any suggestion that we ignore FCA reports misrepresents our ongoing efforts to protect people," Meta's Daniels said. Putting the onus on FCA, Meta spokesperson said that advertisers running financial services ads in Britain were required to be authorised by the FCA and were responsible for complying with applicable law.

Meta blocks scam ads in Australia, 'fails' in UK

On its part, Reuters claims it too ran tests to check how effective Meta is at blocking potential scams under different regulatory regimes. A Reuters reporter created a suspicious investment promotion to run on Facebook teasing 10% returns a week. He then tried to run the ads in Britain and Australia. During the ad verification process for both countries, Meta asked reportedly Reuters to declare if the ad was for financial services by ticking a box.

To try to emulate scammers, it didn't tick the box in either case.Incidentally in the UK, Meta does not risk any financial penalty for running scam ads. In Australia, the company faces fines of up to A$50 million if it fails to detect scams under that country's mandatory approach to financial advertiser verification.In an emailed statement, Meta said that the ad posted by Reuters in Australia was caught because of enhancements in its process in that country for financial services verification, without explaining what those enhancements were. The company added that it was working to identify more effective safeguards that worked globally and that it had increased the percentage of ad revenue globally coming from verified advertisers to 70% in 2025 from 55% at the end of 2024.