Meta to force financial advertisers to be verified in bid to prevent celebrity scam ads targeting Australians | Scams
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Fake celebrity investment scams may soon be harder to push on Facebook and Instagram, p Meta introducing a requirement for financial advertisers to be vetted.
Beginning in February, Meta will require advertisers who want to run financial services ads to verify who the payee and payer are. Firms will be required to provide their Australian Financial Services License number or declare an exemption. Individuals will be required to provide official identification.
The license number will be verified by the Australian Securities Investments Commission.
It will apply to advertisers worldwide targeting Australian users on Meta’s platforms. Advertisers will also need to verify the business by uploading business documents. The person doing this will need to confirm that they work for the business, such as providing a work email address.
Like political ads on Facebook, financial ads will require a disclaimer that allows users to see information about who is behind them.
Implementation will begin for all advertisers in early February and is expected to take approximately six weeks.
Meta has faced pressure from politicians and regulators over the past few years to tackle an epidemic of fraud involving deep fake images of public figures, including Martin LewisDavid Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others used to promote investment.
By the end of September, there had been $135 million in reported losses from investment fraud in 2024. in Australia, according to the National Anti-Fraud Centre, with $35 million coming from social media scams.
Meta is was sued by mining magnate Andrew Forrest for allegedly failing to tackle fraud using his image. There is also a lawsuit pending by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The move to scrutinize financial services advertising has been implemented in Taiwan and the UK, but the timing of the Australian launch comes before the federal government adopts framework legislation to prevent fraud – now before Parliament – which will require digital platforms to vet advertisers.
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David Agranovich, director of global threat disruption at Meta, told Guardian Australia that the company expects fraudsters to try to avoid the automatic and manual detection methods that Meta uses, but the new restrictions should help.
“Fraudsters are highly obnoxious and highly motivated, not only on Facebook but across the Internet, and so the more friction we can inject into their operations, the less efficient they can be, the more expensive their operations become, and ideally, the less attractive our platforms become for fraudsters to use,” he said.
“What it does is add, I think, a significant layer of friction to ads that are posing as financial services providers.”
Last month Meta has begun testing facial recognition technology in advertisements to detect the potential use of fake celebrity endorsements.
A parliamentary committee reviewing the federal government’s fraud prevention framework is due to report at the end of January.
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