Poland is asking the European Commission to impose a €250 million ($291.3 million) penalty on Meta, escalating a dispute over fraudulent advertisements on Facebook and Instagram into a wider test of how much responsibility large platforms should bear for scams distributed through their advertising systems.
Politico reported that Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said Meta had failed to provide an “effective and adequate response” to fraudulent advertisements despite repeated notifications from Polish authorities and cybersecurity teams, according to Politico.
Reuters reported that Gawkowski formally asked Brussels for the €250 million fine after accusing Meta of failing to adequately tackle fraudulent advertising. He argued that Meta was acting in its own commercial interest by allowing deceptive advertising to remain monetizable.
Poland Says Most Reported Scam Ads Stayed Online
The case is backed by testing from CERT Polska, Poland’s national cybersecurity incident response team.
CERT Polska identified 122 advertisements classified as fraudulent. Meta declined to remove 106 of them, or 86.8%, according to Gawkowski; just 10 ads were removed, while Meta provided no response in another six cases.
Those numbers make Poland’s complaint particularly relevant for platform engineers. The dispute is not simply about whether Meta has scam-detection systems, but whether those systems can act reliably after trusted cybersecurity organizations have already flagged suspicious advertising.
Gawkowski said the period for simply asking platforms to improve had passed and called for “effective tools to eliminate scams, false advertising, and the promotion of illegal applications”.
Meta Says Scammers Are Becoming More Sophisticated
Meta disputes the idea that it is failing to address fraud.
The company shared that “scammers are persistent criminals who use increasingly sophisticated tactics” and said it continues investing heavily in technology and partnerships with industry and law enforcement to detect and remove fraudulent activity.
That response highlights an increasingly difficult engineering problem for advertising platforms: scam campaigns can rapidly change identities, creative assets, domains and payment methods, forcing detection systems to evaluate not only individual ads but the networks behind them.
InPost Founder’s Fake Ads Add Pressure
The confrontation also follows a high-profile dispute involving Polish billionaire and InPost founder Rafał Brzoska.
Reuters reported that Brzoska sued Meta in 2024 after fake Facebook and Instagram advertisements used his face and published false information concerning his wife. In April 2026, the Warsaw appellate court ruled that Meta was responsible for advertisements hosted on its platforms, rejecting Meta’s argument that it should not be responsible for fraudulent actions carried out by users.
Gawkowski now plans to raise the issue with other European leaders around the upcoming G20 summit, seeking a broader joint position against Meta’s practices.
Scam Detection Is Becoming Core Platform Infrastructure
For Meta and other ad-driven platforms, Poland’s challenge points to a broader shift in European technology regulation.
Fraud prevention can no longer sit purely inside a moderation team. Effective enforcement increasingly depends on advertiser verification, automated scam detection, account-level risk signals, response times and systems capable of shutting down repeat offenders before campaigns scale.
That creates a potentially expensive new standard for ad platforms: earning revenue from an advertisement increasingly comes with an expectation that the platform can demonstrate who placed it, detect when it is deceptive and respond quickly once credible authorities flag it.
Poland’s proposed €250 million fine makes that engineering responsibility increasingly difficult to treat as merely a trust-and-safety issue.
