Analysis of the Fraud Ecosystem of Online Advertising on Meta Platforms

The research department of the Austrian Institute for Applied Telecommunications (ÖIAT), which runs the consumer-watchdog service Watchlist Internet, analyzed Meta's public Ad Library over a three-month period on behalf of the Austrian media regulator KommAustria. The study, "Analysis of the Fraud Ecosystem of Online Advertising on Meta Platforms" (presented 1 June 2026), screened advertisements served to users in Austria on Facebook and Instagram for fraudulent and otherwise problematic content, with the study design drawing on Watchlist Internet's fraud-reporting data.

The analysis identified more than 634,000 fraudulent or problematic ads, which were shown over 1 billion times across the EU and roughly 123 million times in Austria. Three fraud categories dominated: illegal online gambling (about 450,000 ads), investment fraud (83,216 ads) and dubious dietary supplements (27,171 ads), alongside fake shops. Deceptive design was a recurring pattern, with artificial scarcity ("Only xxx items left!") and staged urgency ("Offer valid for xxx hours only") used to pressure users. At the time of the survey, 62.4% of the ads flagged by the study had already been removed by Meta for violating its own policies.

Critically, many ads catalogued by the researchers disappeared from the Ad Library shortly afterwards, frustrating independent scrutiny and, the authors argue, breaching the transparency-repository obligations of the Digital Services Act. The report frames Meta's automated ad system as a structural enabler of consumer fraud at scale and calls for a reliable, complete and durable public ad archive.