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.
