Warsaw has sent a letter to Brussels calling for Meta to be fined €250 million over scam advertising on its platforms.
In a letter to the EU’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski called for Meta to be fined for fraud and misleading advertising on its platforms, seeking an inquiry into breaches of six articles of the DSA, including risk assessment and mitigation, transparency for advertisers and reporting systems for illegal content.
The Deputy Prime Minister wrote that Poland has warned the company to remove 122 fraudulent advertisements; however, Meta does not ensure “an effective and adequate response to scam advertisements,” having removed only 13% of the fake adverts.
A spokesperson for the European Commission said: “The Commission will continue to fully enforce the DSA and we welcome any third-party evidence. We have already taken action against several online platforms, and we are already investigating Meta on this very issue.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Meta said the company is “working hard to stop them and continuing to engage constructively with the European Commission and regulators as part of this shared effort. Last year, [Meta] removed over 159 million scam adverts globally.”
Gawkowski stated that reports that Meta is removing fraudulent schemes and scams from its platforms in the EU “show that scams are not a marginal phenomenon occurring outside the platform’s main operating model,” but rather one of “the largest and most persistent forms of abuse within the Meta ecosystem.”
On 30 April 2024, the Commission launched “formal proceedings against Facebook and Instagram under the Digital Services Act” regarding fraudulent advertisements, but no investigation has been initiated since then.
