In less than a month, hundreds of thousands of Belgians were exposed to at least one fraudulent financial advertisement on Facebook, often impersonating well-known banks, investors, or media, according to De Tijd’s investigation.
De Tijd examined Meta’s advertising library, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Under the European Digital Services Act, the US giant is required to keep the details of each advertisement publicly accessible for at least a year.
A search for stock-related campaigns, written in Dutch, targeted at Belgian users and published on a Meta platform between 1 and 28 July, yielded 800 results. Upon analysis, only one was found to be genuine. Often, multiple ads run under the same campaign. Together, the 799 suspicious campaigns accounted for more than 6,500 different fraudulent advertisements.
The number of users exposed to these fraudulent campaigns is alarmingly high. The most popular ad, operating under the name "Euronext Brussels," reached over 192,300 unique Belgian Meta platform users. It was mainly shown to those aged 65 and over. Though calculating a total is difficult because a single user might see multiple ads, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands were affected.
Of the 799 dubious campaigns identified, 389 had already been removed or had their advertiser blocked. The "Euronext Brussels" campaign was also taken offline, but this occurred only after nearly 200,000 users had viewed it.
