Meta Group Claim- National Media

31st May 2026
Posted in Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Express, Fraud Awareness, Sunday Times

Richardson Hartley Law has joined forced with another law firm to help create a major group action against Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, on behalf of UK victims who lost money to scam adverts running on the company’s platforms.

The claim, brought jointly with Humphries Kerstetter solicitors, was publicised this weekend and has attracted an overwhelmingly positive response from victims across the country.

The Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Daily Express have all covered news of the Meta group claim, which is one of the most significant legal challenges to Meta’s handling of fraudulent advertising in the UK.

Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert website has also reported on the group legal claim.

The claim centres on the systematic use of Facebook and Instagram to serve fraudulent investment advertisements to UK consumers – including deepfake videos of well-known figures such as Martin Lewis – which directed victims to investment scams resulting in significant financial losses.

Martin Richardson said: “These are not random frauds that happened to use social media. Meta’s advertising platforms were the vehicle through which victims were targeted and deceived, often repeatedly. The scale of what has happened is enormous and Meta has both the means and the responsibility to have done more to prevent it.”

The law firms have spent months bringing the Meta group claim together to help scam victims. The more people who come forward, the stronger the group action becomes.

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 action is being pursued on a no-win, no-fee basis. 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.

Read the some of the media coverage of the claim:

If you lost money to a scam advert on Facebook or Instagram, visit www.metagroupclaims.co.uk.