London , June 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is to face a multi-billion pound group legal action over its role in enabling scam advertisements that have devastated the financial lives of tens of thousands of British consumers.
The legal claim is being launched by two specialist law firms, Humphries Kerstetter and Richardson Hartley Law, to recoup the billions of pounds that are lost each year in online scams, through the two social media platforms.
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."
Every year, tens of thousands of British consumers are scammed out of their savings after responding to fraudulent advertisements on Facebook and Instagram promoting fake investment schemes, cryptocurrency fraud, and bogus financial products.
The human cost is devastating: an initial sign-up process run by Richardson Hartley Law, which has already signed up hundreds of victims to join the claim, found that the average loss per victim stands at around £37,000, often representing life savings accumulated over decades. Despite the scale of the harm, neither the British Government nor its regulators have moved decisively to hold Meta to account, leaving victims with nowhere to turn.
Earlier this month money guru Martin Lewis and consumer champions Which? wrote to the Prime Minister Keir Starmer 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.
The law firms say that they hope by bringing this group action it will help to incentivise Meta to address scam adverts shown on Facebook and Instagram.
The case follows a series of explosive Reuters investigations using Meta's own internal documents, which claimed that the company had knowingly profited from fraudulent advertising. The report claimed that if Meta suspected an advert was fraudulent then it would charge the scammers more money and only took down the offending advert it was 95% certain it was a fraud.
Toby Starr, Partner at Humphries Kerstetter, which is currently running an adtech claim against Google, said: "The internal documents uncovered by Reuters go to the very core of what Meta knew, when it knew it, and what it chose to do - or not do - about it. 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. The strength of the evidence here is significant, and we intend to use it."
At the heart of the case is Meta's sophisticated tracking and targeting infrastructure; a system the two firms say has been used to deliver fraudulent investment schemes, fake cryptocurrency products, and bogus financial promotions to the consumers most vulnerable to them with chilling precision. The same technology, they argue, has enabled a second wave of harm: 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. The firms estimate that up to 40% of fraud victims are scammed more than once through this mechanism.
The action is being pursued on a no-win, no-fee basis (with a full explanation available prior to signing up). 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.
Potential claimants can register their details at www.metagroupclaims.co.uk
enquiries@rhlaw.co.uk
