Meta fails to monitor financial ads in UK

British regulator finds illegal ads for high-risk investments, more than half of them from advertisers it had already flagged to Meta, write Phoebe Seers, Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Jeff Horwitz from London and San Francisco

- 

American tech giant Meta has repeatedly failed to stop illegal ads for high-risk financial products running on its platforms in Britain, despite committing to block them, according to a review by the country's financial regulator.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that during one week in November, 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.

What's more, 56% of those ads were from an unspecified number of unauthorised advertisers the FCA had already flagged to Meta, according to the results of the review seen by Reuters and reported here for the first time.

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, according to internal Meta documents previously reported by Reuters.

Britain’s FCA warned last year that people were increasingly being targeted on social media by online trading scams where fraudsters offer currency trades. Its review was an attempt to see how successful Meta has been at weeding out the rogue ads.

Asked about the FCA’s findings, Ryan Daniels, a spokesperson for Meta, said it fights fraud and scams aggressively on a global level and takes swift action on the vast majority of reports within days.

The regulator focused on Meta's platforms — which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — because they carry a disproportionate amount of suspicious financial ads, a person familiar with the FCA’s work said.

“Fraud is the most common crime in the UK,’ an FCA spokesperson said. “With over half of some scams originating on their platforms, it’s vital Meta steps up and uses its tools to protect users from scam content.”