Poland asks EU to fine Meta €250 million over scam ads as company pledges new checks

Poland has escalated its long-running dispute with Meta over fraudulent advertising. Deputy Prime Minister and digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski sent a formal request to the European Commission on August 26 asking it to fine the company €250 million, roughly 1 billion zlotys, for what he describes as systematic failure to remove scam ads, fake investment offers using celebrities’ likenesses and counterfeit shops from Facebook and Instagram. He announced the move on X the following day, saying the “wild west” on the platform had to end.

The ministry’s case rests on its own reporting record. According to Wirtualne Media, Poland’s CERT flagged 122 scam ads to Meta, which declined to act on 106 of them and removed only ten. The request is a recommendation rather than a sanction: under the Digital Services Act only the Commission can penalize a very large platform, with fines capped at 6 percent of global turnover, and Meta would first have to be heard. Separately, Poland’s competition authority UOKiK has its own proceedings open against the company over consumer contact channels and ad mechanisms.

Meta’s answer

Meta responded within 24 hours with a package of Polish measures, reported by Bankier.pl. The company says it is rolling out a new AI detection model tuned for Poland, one of the first such deployments in Europe, and will within weeks require every advertiser of financial services targeting Polish users to pass identity verification, instead of only accounts that look suspicious. It also cited its own numbers: about 137,000 fraudulent ads from Poland removed between July 2025 and June 2026, 88 percent of them before any user report, and an 83 percent drop in fraud complaints over two years. Globally Meta wants 90 percent of ad revenue to come from verified advertisers by the end of 2026, up from 70 percent last year.

Why it matters

The pressure is coming from business as well as government. InPost founder Rafał Brzoska, whose face has been used in fake arrest stories and investment scams, argues that €250 million is too small to change behavior and that only multi-billion penalties would work; his “150 percent” initiative, which proposes fines equal to one and a half times revenue earned from scams, collected close to 100,000 signatures in a week. Whatever Brussels decides, the episode shows that a national government can force product changes from Meta without waiting for a Commission ruling, and that advertiser verification, long resisted as friction, is becoming the default for sensitive categories. Legitimate financial brands advertising in Poland should expect to complete verification soon.