Lloyds Says 68% of Customer Fraud Starts on Meta Platforms

More than two-thirds of fraud reported by Lloyds Bank customers begins on Meta-owned platforms, according to the bank’s fraud prevention director, writing in The Sunday Times. She said 68% of customer fraud reports started on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

The bank’s data shows people in their late twenties and early thirties are most at risk overall, while under-25s, including children under 18, are particularly vulnerable to ticket scams. Concert, festival and sports ticket fraud was the most common category reported, with fake tickets for major concerts and football matches among the examples cited. Other scams involved bogus Facebook Marketplace adverts for cars, vehicles, rental deposits, furniture and electronics.

The losses are climbing. Lloyds said consumers are sending around £66 million (about $88 million) a year to fraudsters after engaging with scam adverts on Meta platforms, up from £27 million in 2023, while the average fraud claim has now passed £500, roughly £100 higher than a year earlier.

The findings arrive as UK law firms prepare a group action against Meta on behalf of hundreds of scam victims. Meta said scammers use increasingly sophisticated tactics, and that it removed more than 159 million scam adverts last year, 92% of them before they were reported, and that it works with banks and law enforcement to disrupt fraud. The exposure of younger users echoes the wider platform-safety concern that drove the UK’s move to ban under-16s from major social platforms, and recent law-enforcement warnings about ticket and crypto scams around the FIFA World Cup.

Much of this fraud depends on bad actors opening accounts and posting adverts in the first place. Stopping it upstream means making it harder for fraudsters to onboard, and harder for minors to be drawn into scams, without adding friction for genuine users.

Shufti’s fraud prevention and identity verification, combined with age verification at the platform layer, help social networks and marketplaces keep bad actors out and protect younger users. Platforms can request a demo to see how layered checks work in practice.