Scam Adverts Cost 13.5 Million UK Adults, Revolut Report

One in four UK adults say they have lost money after clicking on a fraudulent online advert, the equivalent of roughly 13.5 million people, according to a report published on 2 July 2026 by research consultancy Public First and commissioned by digital bank Revolut. The findings point to scam advertising becoming a routine feature of online life, one that is reshaping how consumers shop and how far they trust unfamiliar brands.

The report, titled Clicking with Caution, draws on a nationally representative poll of 2,008 online UK adults carried out between 29 May and 1 June 2026. It found that 51% of respondents see adverts they suspect to be scams very often or fairly often, and that social media was the most commonly cited place to encounter them, named by 65% of those polled. More than a third of adults, 35%, said they had cut their online spending over the past year because of scam adverts, while 68% reported abandoning an online purchase that began with an advert out of fear it might be fraudulent.

Trust is measurably eroding. According to the research, 78% of UK adults say scam adverts make them less trusting of unfamiliar brands, 81% believe there is not enough protection for consumers from online scams, and 86% say consumers remain vulnerable under the current system. Public First noted that when it showed participants a mix of genuine Revolut adverts and fakes built with off-the-shelf AI tools, the share who felt confident they could identify a scam advert almost halved after the exercise.

Artificial intelligence sits at the centre of the problem. The report found that 72% of UK adults say AI makes scam adverts harder to identify, and 80% believe the volume of scam adverts using AI-generated images, videos, voices, or deepfakes has risen over the past year. Woody Malouf, Revolut’s General Manager of Financial Crime, argued that scam ads are eroding the trust the digital economy is built on and that stopping fraud at its source must become an obligation for the platforms where these scams originate, rather than an option.

The findings expose a structural weakness in how the advertising ecosystem is policed. Platforms earn revenue from advertisers whose identities and legitimacy are frequently unverified at the point of onboarding, allowing fraudulent businesses and impersonators to buy reach at scale. Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing convincing fake creative, and detection systems built for an earlier era of cruder scams are struggling to keep pace with the synthetic images and cloned voices designed to defeat them.

Closing that gap requires verifying who is behind an advert before it reaches consumers and detecting AI-manipulated content before it spreads. This calls for business verification that confirms the legitimacy of advertisers, combined with forensic detection capable of flagging deepfakes and synthetic media. Shufti’s fraud prevention and deepfake detection tools, alongside its Know Your Business checks, operate across 240+ countries and territories to verify corporate identities and surface manipulated media during onboarding. Platforms and financial institutions weighing how to respond to the trust problem the report describes can explore Shufti’s fraud prevention capabilities or request a demo.

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