Is the ad a scam? How to tell before you click
Social Media
You can trust a social media platform and still get scammed by an ad running on it
20 Oct 2026 • 7 min. read
Fraudulent ads have been around for about as long as the advertising industry. Today, they often reach you through social media feeds, apps and search results you use every day, and the platforms showing them can also (inadvertently) help build them. In September, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked whether platforms should be required to stop impersonation scam ads from ever reaching consumers. Its concern is the ad tools that those platforms offer to advertisers. They can generate the copy, images and video, and optimize who sees the result, regardless of whether the ads are legitimate or not.
In Europe, nearly one trillion scam ads were served to social media users in 2025, generating an estimated£3.8 billion in revenue for these platforms....
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