Lucy Castledine, Director of Consumer Investments, FCA, speaking at the Good Money Guide London Summit in September 2025 said: ” We have no power over these tech companies”.
Castledine explained that the regulator reviews around half a million potential financial promotions each year, with about 20,000 adverts from regulated firms taken down or amended and thousands of alerts issued against unregulated firms.
But, because major tech platforms like Meta are often unresponsive, the FCA now relies on an external agency to issue and chase takedown requests. Castledine stressed that the FCA has no formal powers over these companies, relying instead on persuasion and evidence of consumer harm. She described how scammers quickly reappear using “lifeboat accounts”, duplicate profiles that post identical content within 24 hours of removal, and called on tech platforms to act proactively to identify and remove scam content before consumers see it.
See more information on how Facebook is deliberately profiting from social media scam ads here.
Watch the full panel discussion here.
Philip Clements – Finspector
I remember from Lucy, you in your report, I think that you did with the Treasury Committee, you talked about having it took six weeks or something for Meta to take down certain posts. Suppose my question really is, how do you actually work in practice with these providers to make sure they’re giving you the data they need or taking down the data you don’t want in real time? What does that look like? Because some of them aren’t listed here, they’re listed in different jurisdictions. So how does that actually work?
Lucy Castledine, Director of Consumer Investments, FCA
Where do I even start with that? So internally, we’ve developed the technology to be able to scrape the website is the starting point. We look at, it’s close to half a million potential financial promotions. That’s filtered down to a manual review. I think it was about 3,700 last year, of which we have nearly 20,000 advertisements from regulated firms either taken down or amended. And we’ve issued thousands of alerts against unregulated firms as well.
We’ve partnered with an external agency who will do the takedown requests for us and the main rationale and reason for that is funnily enough some of the tech platforms aren’t actually that responsive to the takedown requests so it’s better to have an external agency literally bombarding and checking and making sure that that is taken down rather than one of my divisions sitting there and doing that. But we have no powers over these tech companies.
So it has been through persuasion, ⁓ providing a very solid body of evidence to them that actually they are causing harm to UK consumers. ⁓ And it’s a continual process because the technology continues to evolve.
You know there was some talking of the sort of the deep fake scams there was a CEO of one of our regulated firms that was deep faked and you know the traditional thing that you see now is that it’s come and join me on this WhatsApp group it’s a link on social media to begin with and it goes through to a WhatsApp group and that’s where the harm really happens. That particular firm and there were two or three actually over the course of a week could not get any traction with the with Meta. We got involved and eventually on that one particular occasion that was actually taken down. But it’s through persuasion and it’s through the evidence base and proving the harm to the UK consumer. Because if we don’t do that, what we fundamentally need to do is build trust in this industry. We need to create that trust. We need to create space for the good firms to be able to innovate and meet the consumers where they’re going for that advice in the first place. And to do so, we need to clear up the less scrupulous end of the industry.
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