Scams in plain sight

The team of orange-suited Nasa astronauts stride, beaming and clapping, towards the camera. Captions introduce ‘revenue share options’ tied, allegedly, to the performance of US spaceflight company SpaceX.

Over a montage of rocket launch footage, the captions confidently assure us that ‘the more SpaceX earns, the more you receive straight to your account’. 

They explain that investors can profit every time SpaceX launches a satellite into space. 

The advertiser who posted this on Facebook isn’t allowed to do this. It doesn’t have permission (known as ‘authorisation’) from the UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to promote investments. 

Blacklisted firms’ ads still online

Firms and individuals usually need FCA authorisation to promote or provide financial services such as investments, insurance, credit or financial advice. 

If the FCA is concerned that a person or business is performing these services without authorisation, or if it thinks they’re running a scam, it adds them to its warning list. 

The warning list is easily available and searchable online, and you can even receive email alerts when new firms are added. 

Conducting regulated activities without authority (or an exemption) is a criminal offence. But we’ve found that dozens of unauthorised firms from recent FCA warnings were able to advertise on at least one of the UK’s most popular tech platforms at some point.

To expose them, we started by looking at 300 recently published or recently updated warnings from the FCA warning list. These were cross-referenced against the ad libraries of Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads), Google (which owns YouTube) and TikTok. 

• Find out more: Investment scams surge

Cleared for lift-off

One website called privatemarketunlock.uk, was able to advertise on Meta platforms between 21 May and 8 June this year. 

Despite tagging its page as a ‘gaming video creator’, it was flogging alleged investments in SpaceX without FCA authorisation – something Meta apparently failed to detect.

The site was only created on 6 April this year, with the regulator publishing its warning two months later, on 5 June. The firm was able to continue promoting itself on Facebook for a further three days. 

One of the firm’s ads mentions the historic launch of Artemis II in April. Scammers often link their claims to high-profile news or world events in an attempt to seem more credible.

This hasn't stopped Facebook owner Meta from taking the firm’s money and pushing its claims out to 2,126 people in the UK for that advert alone. 

In total, its ads reached 5,457 people in the UK before Meta disabled it for not following its advertising standards. We were unable to contact Private Market Unlock for comment, as its website was also offline.

First in Which? Money magazine

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Pulling a fast one (since 2022)

Coverfast, which also calls itself TempDrive, was first slapped with an FCA warning in 2022. This warning was updated in late June this year to encompass new information. 

The FCA says it’s a ‘clone firm’ impersonating two genuine firms, in France and the UK, respectively. Yet it was the only firm we found on all three ad libraries, offering temporary insurance for cars, vans and motorbikes. 

The ads ceased on Meta and TikTok’s platforms in May, but its ads were appearing on Google search results pages as recently as 18 July. Two of its Meta ads reached more than 21,000 people each. 

Those paying TempDrive/Coverfast for temporary cover may find themselves unprotected if they get into an accident. What’s more, its site asks drivers to share their vehicle registration and upload an image of their licence, raising the spectre of identity theft.

TempDrive/Coverfast failed to respond when we contacted it

• Find out more: 'Ghost brokers' and bogus insurance policies

Suspicious ads still online, after being reported

Most of the advertisers on the warning list had advertised prior to appearing on it, and some had subsequently been banned and/or had ads removed for violating platforms’ codes of conduct. 

We still think taking money from unauthorised providers is poor form from the platforms, even if they haven’t appeared on the warning list, as it puts platform users at risk of serious financial harm.

But nine firms were able to continue advertising on at least one of the platforms, even after being published on the warning list. Some of them continued advertising for weeks or even months after. 

And two of these (on Meta’s library) were still active when we checked. One was promoting crypto trading, while the other offered to help businesses write off their Covid bounceback loans. 

We first reported them in the same way an individual user would, using the in-app reporting tool, but they were still live when we checked six days later. 

Even after we reported them to Meta’s press office, it only removed one of the active ads and left the other intact. We pressed Meta on this decision, offering clear evidence that the remaining advertiser was the same firm as in the FCA warning, but it didn’t respond on that point.

Meta voluntarily promised years ago to stop publishing financial services ads from unauthorised companies. 

Not all unauthorised firms are scams, but many are, which is why the standard wording of FCA warnings is to ‘beware of scams’. 

Meta has form when it comes to profiting from scams. 

Last year, Reuters revealed leaked internal Meta documents in which the social media giant predicted 10% of its revenue would come from scams. The revelation informed our decision to award Meta a Shoddy Award for the third year in a row.

Yet Meta is far from the only one making money from fraudulent advertising. Rival social media platforms and search engines also host paid-for fraudulent content. 

Ad libraries

This research was only possible because Google, Meta and TikTok provide some form of ad library in the UK. That can’t be said of X (formerly Twitter), which meant it couldn't be included in this research.

Of course, having an ad library provides far greater transparency and allows for far greater scrutiny than not having one. Yet not all ad libraries are equal. While we found ads on Meta’s library from as far back as 2021, Google and TikTok only showed us ones from the past year. 

Meta and TikTok show how many have viewed the ad (the latter expresses it as a range rather than a specific number), while Google does not.

All three libraries often prevent you from seeing what banned ads looked like and what they said, but TikTok goes one step further and redacts the name of the violating advertiser. 

On multiple occasions, we searched TikTok’s library for firms from the warning list and were confronted with blacked-out rectangles and removed names, which made it impossible to tell whether or not they were true matches. 

On other occasions, we received clearly irrelevant results written in Chinese characters, despite filtering our search for UK ads.

Although the majority of matches we found were on Meta or Google’s ad libraries (we only found one match on TikTok’s library), discrepancies between ad library availability, functionality and quality make it very difficult to compare the scale of the problem across different platforms. 

Communications regulator Ofcom has plans to address this problem. It has proposed that all platforms with ads should have consistent and publicly available ad libraries that even non-users can search. 

Platforms respond

TikTok declined to comment when we approached it. As for Meta, it told us that ‘determined criminals’ were using ‘increasingly sophisticated tactics to evade detection on our platforms and across the internet. We fight scams on and off our platforms because they’re not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services.’

Meta noted that it requires advertisers promoting financial products to demonstrate appropriate FCA authorisation, saying it has removed 159m scam ads so far in 2026 – 92% taken down before anyone reported them. 

It said that ongoing collaboration with the banking sector and law enforcement ‘has helped intercept fraudulent activity, protect people from scams, and hold scammers accountable, reflecting our commitment to addressing this widespread challenge’.

On the Reuters article about its leaked internal documents, it added: ‘These claims rely on Reuters reporting that distorts our motives and ignores the full range of actions we take to combat scams every day.’

Google told us: ‘To protect users against fraud, we have strict rules for advertising financial products on our platforms. Upon reviewing the flagged ads, we suspended the associated advertiser accounts for violating our ads policies.’

Google said it continually refines its ad policies and blocked or removed more than 602m ads in 2025, suspending more than 4m accounts for violating its scams-related ads policies. It said its systems now catch over 99% of policy-violating ads before they are ever served to a user, adding that financial services advertisers are required to prove that they are authorised by the appropriate national financial services regulator in their country and then complete Google’s verification programme.

When we went to the FCA with our findings, it said: ‘It’s unacceptable that tech firms are allowing fraudsters to target people who trust their platforms. Worse, they are profiting from these scams and illegal financial promotions. Tech firms must do more to stop fraudulent ads at source. They don’t need to wait for Ofcom’s new rules to come into force and should step up now.’

The regulator added that all major social media sites and search engines now have policies requiring financial services ads to be FCA-authorised, but said it is concerned that tech firms are not doing enough to uphold those policies.

A fresh start?

At the moment, platforms aren’t legally compelled to prevent unauthorised and scam adverts. But huge legal changes are on the horizon, thanks in part to years of Which? campaigning.

When the Online Safety Act was first proposed in 2019, it didn’t include fraudulent paid-for advertising within its remit. We fought to change that, and when the law finally passed in 2023, scam ads were included. 

Yet the section relating to scam ads is still not in force three years later, and is now expected to take effect from some point next year.

Ofcom has proposed that under the new law, tech giants will be expected to proactively intercept fraudulent advertisers, ban them and stop them from creating new accounts. Platforms will also be expected to detect financial services content, even when it isn’t tagged as such by advertisers. 

The rules will be policed by Ofcom, and platforms that flout them will face fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue, whichever is greater.

Yet all these measures are subject to consultation, and we could still see changes. Meta has launched a judicial review in an attempt to reduce the fines laid out in the new law. It says fines should be based on firms’ UK activities rather than global revenue and has described the suggested fines as ‘disproportionate’.

Ofcom has branded the move disappointing, and says it will ‘robustly defend our reasoning and decisions’. 

It told us it is ‘working at speed’ on the new rules, adding: ‘Once in force, these platforms will for the first time be legally required to put robust measures in place to tackle scam ads. But there’s no need to wait – firms can start making improvements for their users now.’

• Find out more: Big Tech must tackle scam ads or face fines