The owner of Facebook and Instagram faces a multi-billion pound group legal action from British consumers who accuse it of enabling scam adverts which left them facing financial ruin.

Social media platforms are estimated to have raked in more than £430million from UK users last year through hosting fraudulent adverts.

Victims are targeted by sophisticated algorithms which not only track their activity on the sites but also their broader internet use via cookies from third party websites.

As a result, someone searching for pension advice or looking to invest will be shown relevant adverts, some of which may be bogus.

To make matters worse, fraud victims who search online for how to recover some of the money they have lost are frequently scammed for a second time after unwittingly being directed to fake sites.

Just last month personal finance expert Martin Lewis said social media scam advertisements using his name and face to dupe unsuspecting consumers had become ‘worse than ever’.

The Money Saving Expert website founder and consumer champions Which? wrote to the Prime Minister demanding urgent action against the plague of online fraud.

‘Major online platforms are not just hosting criminal activity, they are actively profiting from it,’ the letter stated.

Under the Online Safety Act, Meta has a legal, proactive duty to minimise harm on its platforms, or it can face a fine of ten per cent of its worldwide turnover, which in 2025 stood at $200billion.

But the letter accused ministers of giving platforms ‘free rein to continue profiting from the financial and emotional harm scams cause to millions of victims every year’.

Now two law firms have joined forces in a bid to recoup some of the vast sums of money lost by British users of Facebook and Instagram from its owner, Meta.

The tech giant projected in 2024 that it would earn about 10 per cent of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, according to internal company documents obtained by Reuters.

Among those hoping for redress is Wayne Luxon, who lost £140,000 to a cryptocurrency scam after seeing a deepfake Martin Lewis video on Facebook.

The 43-year-old, from Taunton, Somerset, said he went to a ‘dark place’ after he was conned into investing into a fraudulent clone of legitimate platform.

‘Facebook should be stopping these adverts straight away,’ he said.

‘It’s not fair to the people that get conned into investing, and once you click on one advert there’s another and another. They are constantly coming up on your feed.’

The legal claim is being launched by two specialist law firms, Humphries Kerstetter and Richardson Hartley Law.

An initial sign-up process found that the average loss per victim stands at around £37,000, often representing life savings accumulated over decades.

Martin Richardson, senior partner at Richardson Hartley Law, a firm that specialises in fraud said: ‘Politicians are wary of taking on trillion-dollar corporations with armies of lawyers and lobbyists, and that reluctance has left victims without justice for too long.

‘The people we represent are good, honest, intelligent individuals.

‘They have lost their savings, their confidence, sometimes everything.

‘The platform that put those adverts in front of them is making hundreds of millions of pounds a year from doing so.

‘We have no choice but to fight for them.’

Mr Luxon’s ordeal began in 2020 when he saw the video on Facebook which claimed he could earn extra income by investing as little as £250 into cryptocurrency.

The father-of-four said he believed the site was ‘totally legitimate’ after his initial payment doubled and he was able to withdraw £500.

He made three further payments totalling £16,000, with his fictitious account reaching £800,000.

But when the self-employed digger driver tried to take out some money, he was asked to pay a tax based on a percentage of the amount he would withdraw.

He took out personal loans and raided his business bank account with Barclays to get together more than £100,000, only to find his balance on the platform had gone down to zero.

‘I looked at it and thought “Oh my God”,’ he said.

Barclays agreed to refund half of his initial investment, but refused to return any of the fake tax he paid.

Now, by joining the group action against Meta, he hopes to get more of his money back.

Jakub Siwiak was conned out of nearly £15,000 after responding to a scam advert on Facebook.

The 51-year-old from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, was plunged into debt when he was tricked by a criminal posing as a real investment broker in June 2025.

The advert on Facebook had promised good returns on the foreign exchange market.

But when it became clear he had been conned he was left paying £1,300 a month for loan repayments he could barely afford.

The crane operator and supervisor had been looking online for investment opportunities, which led to Facebook’s tracking algorithms inundating his feed with money-making adverts.

‘I got scammed because of Facebook,’ he said.

‘A lot of adverts were showing up, and that’s all done by Facebook.

‘When something is suspect, they should take it off and give fair play to all of its customers, which we are, even if we don’t pay.’

The law firms say victims who search online for help following a scam are identified by Meta's systems and served with advertisements from fake recovery services, defrauding them all over again.

They hope the group action – being brought on a no-win, no-fee basis - will help to incentivise Meta to address scam adverts.

Anyone who lost £2,000 or more after responding to a fraudulent advertisement on Facebook or Instagram in the past six years may be eligible to join.

Toby Starr, partner at Humphries Kerstetter, said: ‘When a company repeatedly makes decisions that harm a vast number of individuals through the same course of conduct, those individuals have every right to seek collective redress.’

In response, a Meta spokesman said: 'Scammers are determined criminals who use increasingly sophisticated tactics to defraud people and evade detection on our platforms and across the internet. 

'We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they're not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services. 

Advertisers promoting financial products in the UK were required ‘to demonstrate appropriate Financial Conduct Authority authorisation’, he added.

The firm said it removed more than 159million scam adverts last year alone, 92 per cent of them before anyone reported them.  

'Our 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,' the spokesman added.

Meta said the Reuters report ‘distorts our motives and ignores the full range of actions we take to combat scams every day’.

Meanwhile the Government insisted that social media platforms which did not 'proactively tackle illegal fraudulent content' such as scam adverts would 'face consequences' under the Online Safety Act.

'Scammers who trick people into parting with their money are committing a criminal offence and should expect to be punished,' a spokesperson said. 

'This Government is backing words with action, delivering £79 million this year to tackle fraud head-on.

'We've published a Fraud Strategy to protect consumers and disrupt criminal networks. But platforms also have a responsibility to ensure their sites are not providing a forum for material intended to scam the public.'