If you’ve used Facebook for any amount of time, you know that financial scams are a sadly common occurrence on the platform. However, the shape of these cons has changed over time to target a new, increasingly younger demographic. According to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), a UK-based regulatory agency, the number of scammy financial influencers has exploded on social media platforms like Facebook over the last year.

This week, the FCA reported that it ordered businesses to remove or amend 8,582 pieces of promotional content in 2022, 15 times more than the year before. This points to the rise of social media-driven financial scams, including fraudulent cryptocurrency exchanges and more. That’s why the regulatory agency said that companies like Facebook need to do a better job of protecting their users from these bad actors.

“More needs to be done by tech companies to protect consumers,” the watchdog group said. “Given the substantial number of illegal promotions we continue to identify, our expectation is that every social media platform improves their capability to identify and remove the illegal financial promotions on a proactive basis.”

Of course, there’s no doubt that Facebook has the resources to deal with this problem effectively. However, with so much of its own revenue on the line, it’s unclear where the company’s true priorities lie when it comes to cracking down on scams like these.

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