Financial Scams Put Google, Meta and TikTok Under Fresh EU Pressure

Financial scams are now at the center of a fresh European Union challenge to Google, Meta, and TikTok after BEUC and 29 affiliated consumer groups filed Digital Services Act complaints on May 21. The complaints argue the platforms are still allowing fraudulent financial advertising to circulate widely despite legal duties to reduce systemic risks and respond effectively when harmful ads are flagged.

The case matters beyond another clash between Brussels and Big Tech. It tests whether the Digital Services Act can force some of the world’s largest platforms to tighten ad screening, scam reporting, and follow-up enforcement in one of the fastest-growing areas of online consumer harm.

Financial Scams Become a New DSA Stress Test

BEUC’s filing is built around a simple claim: the platforms’ public promises do not match what consumer groups found in practice. According to the coalition, the companies failed both to prevent many scam ads from appearing and to act consistently after being notified.

That makes the dispute a potentially important enforcement test for the European Commission and the national Digital Services Coordinators that share oversight of the law. The DSA was designed to push very large online platforms to assess systemic risks, improve transparency, and create reliable mechanisms for reporting harmful or illegal activity.

Financial Scams Were Flagged at Scale

BEUC said 13 consumer organisations across 13 countries collected 893 examples of suspected fraudulent ads between December 2025 and March 2026. The group said the ads promoted bogus investment offers and other schemes capable of causing direct financial losses to users.

Across the broader complaint, BEUC and its members said nearly 900 ads suspected of breaching EU law were reported to the platforms. Only 27% were removed based on those notices, while 52% of the reports were rejected or ignored, the organisation said.

BEUC also broke out some platform-level results. It said Google removed 60% of the submitted ads, Meta rejected nearly 43% of the ads it received, and TikTok removed only 21%, with many cases marked as already removed before review. Those figures helped the group argue that scam enforcement remains uneven and too slow.

Why Financial Scams Matter to Brussels

Online fraud has become a consumer-protection problem and a market-trust problem at the same time. BEUC said financial losses linked to such scams reached as much as 4.2 billion euros in 2024, underscoring why fake ads are no longer treated as a niche moderation issue.

The European Commission has already shown it is willing to use the Digital Services Act against major platforms. In December 2025, it fined X 120 million euros under the law, a sign that the framework has moved beyond warnings and into real financial penalties.

Under the Commission’s own guidance, non-compliance decisions under the DSA can lead to fines of up to 6% of a provider’s global annual turnover. That threat gives this complaint weight even before any formal findings are reached.

Platforms Reject the Core Allegations

The companies are not accepting BEUC’s conclusions. Reuters reported that Google and Meta rejected the complaints, while TikTok said it takes scam-related violations seriously and views the problem as an industry-wide challenge.

Those responses show how this fight is likely to turn on evidence, reporting methodology, and the legal question of whether the platforms’ systems are effective enough under the DSA rather than whether any single scam ad slipped through.

Google and Meta Point to Existing Controls

Google said the complaint misrepresents how it fights scams and that it blocks more than 99% of policy-violating ads before they are seen, according to Reuters. The company is likely to argue that its preventive systems, rather than the subset of ads identified by consumer groups, are the right benchmark for compliance.

Meta said it removed more than 159 million scam ads last year and that most were taken down before anyone reported them. It also said it invests in artificial intelligence, detection tools, and outside partnerships to limit fraudulent advertising.

For regulators, however, the central question may be whether those headline numbers translate into dependable outcomes for users in live consumer markets. A large removal total can still leave compliance concerns if harmful ads remain easy to place, hard to report, or quick to reappear.

TikTok Faces a Harder Financial Scams Narrative

TikTok’s position is somewhat different because the complaint focuses on low takedown rates and repeated scam patterns that consumer groups say remained visible across multiple countries. That makes the company vulnerable to the argument that fast-growing ad and recommendation systems can amplify risky content before moderation catches up.

TikTok said scams are an industry-wide issue and that bad actors continually adapt their tactics. That is a fair point in operational terms, but it may not carry much legal force if authorities decide the platform’s mitigation systems are still not proportionate to the risk.

The practical challenge for TikTok is that regulators may look not only at formal ad policies but also at how quickly the platform acts after a credible notice, how often repeat advertisers reappear, and how transparent its ad systems are to outside scrutiny.

What the Complaints Could Change

Even if the complaints do not produce immediate fines, they could still push the platforms toward stricter ad vetting, better consumer reporting tools, and more transparent records for regulators and researchers. In that sense, the case is about product design and business process as much as headline regulation.

It also widens the DSA debate beyond speech and disinformation. Financial fraud is easier to connect to measurable consumer harm, which may make enforcement politically simpler and legally sturdier than more subjective content disputes.

Financial Scams May Set a New Enforcement Benchmark

If Brussels opens or accelerates formal investigations, this case could become a benchmark for how the EU measures risk mitigation on very large platforms. Authorities would be testing whether companies can show not just policies on paper, but repeated evidence that those systems reduce harm in practice.

That matters for other categories of platform risk as well. A tougher approach to scam ads could spill into future reviews of impersonation, counterfeit goods, AI-generated deception, and other commercial abuses that move through paid distribution systems.

For Big Tech, the broader implication is that compliance may increasingly depend on auditable performance metrics rather than broad claims about safety investment. The complaint gives regulators a concrete dataset and a narrow harm category on which to press that standard.

The Business Cost of Lost Trust

There is also a commercial risk that extends beyond fines. When users start to associate social feeds and search results with fraudulent investment pitches, the credibility of digital advertising itself weakens, which can damage platform trust with consumers, advertisers, and policymakers.

That is why this issue reaches into media, technology, and financial markets at once. Scam prevention is becoming part of the competitive argument over who can run large advertising systems responsibly in highly regulated regions.

For now, the complaints mark the start of another EU test of platform accountability rather than a final judgment. But if the evidence persuades Brussels, financial scams could become one of the clearest ways the Digital Services Act reshapes how Google, Meta, and TikTok run their ad businesses.

The complaints do not yet establish that Google, Meta, or TikTok violated the Digital Services Act, and the companies are contesting the claims. Still, the filing gives European regulators a fresh, evidence-backed case on a concrete form of consumer harm, and its outcome could influence how platforms police fraudulent advertising well beyond this dispute. Keep reading Berrit Media for related coverage on technology regulation, platform risk, and digital markets.