Of 122 fraudulent ads reported to Meta by Poland’s national cybersecurity team, 106 stayed online. That’s not a moderation backlog. That’s a policy choice.
Poland is now asking the European Union to fine Meta €250 million, roughly $291 million, for failing to remove scam advertisements from its platforms. As reported by Android Headlines, Polish Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski sent a letter to the European Commission on August 26 laying out what his government sees as a clear pattern of neglect. Only ten of those 122 flagged ads were actually taken down. Six got no response at all.
The findings came from CERT Polska, Poland’s cybersecurity incident response team. These aren’t grey-area cases. The ads were flagged as actively fraudulent. Meta’s response rate, or lack of one, tells you something about how the company weighs user harm against ad revenue. Gawkowski didn’t mince words, accusing Meta of putting commercial interests ahead of user safety. It’s hard to argue with the numbers.
Meta, for its part, gave the kind of response you’d expect. A spokesperson told Reuters that scammers are getting more sophisticated and that the company is investing in technology, working with industry groups, and partnering with law enforcement. The statement is polished. But when nearly 87% of reported scam ads remain live, the investment clearly isn’t translating into results fast enough to matter for the people being targeted.
What makes this situation worth watching closely is the broader context. Meta’s ad business is massive, and the platform has long struggled with fraudulent ads that impersonate public figures, promote fake investment schemes, and prey on users who trust what they see in their feed. The EU’s Digital Services Act was supposed to give regulators real tools to push back on exactly this kind of failure. Poland is now testing whether those tools have teeth.
Gawkowski is also pushing other European governments to join the effort. He said he plans to raise the issue at the upcoming G20 summit, arguing that a coordinated European position would carry more weight than any single country acting alone. He’s right about that. Meta can absorb political pressure from one government. A unified bloc demanding accountability is a different kind of problem.
The €250 million figure is significant, but it’s worth keeping perspective. Meta’s annual revenue runs into the tens of billions. A fine at this level stings but doesn’t fundamentally change the economics of running scam-friendly ad infrastructure. For a fine to actually change behavior, regulators would need to tie penalties to a percentage of global revenue, which the DSA does allow, or make repeat violations carry escalating consequences.
So the real question isn’t whether Poland is right to push for a fine. It almost certainly is. The question is whether the EU has the political will to act decisively enough that Meta actually recalculates the math. Right now, the cost of inaction appears lower than the cost of fixing the problem. That’s the dynamic regulators need to break.
For users, none of this changes anything today. Those scam ads are still running. And that’s the part that should bother everyone.