Last Updated on September 9, 2026
Ofcom has published nearly 40 draft measures telling the UK’s biggest platforms how to police scam adverts. Most small business owners will read that headline, decide it is a Big Tech problem, and move on.
That is the mistake. One measure in the list changes what a platform has to know about you before it will run your ads.
What Ofcom actually proposed
On 10 July 2026, Ofcom opened a consultation on draft Fraudulent Advertising Codes of Practice. It is the first time paid-for advertising itself would sit inside enforceable duties under the Online Safety Act 2023. The proposals cover paid adverts only, not organic posts and not ordinary search results.
None of it is in force. The consultation closes on 2 October 2026. Ofcom plans to publish its final statement by mid-2027 at the latest, and the codes take effect only once Parliament approves them. Anyone telling you to act this month is selling something.
The numbers behind it are worth knowing. Over half (51%) of adults who are online have seen a potentially fraudulent advert on social media, search or video-sharing platforms, and over a third (36%) see them frequently. Victims lose an estimated total of over £200 million a year in the UK to these scams. The UK digital advertising market passed £40.5bn in 2025, on IAB UK figures that Ofcom cites in its consultation overview.
The measure that touches your business
Read past the fines. Ofcom’s own summary of what it expects from platforms includes this:
“intercepting imposters who pretend to represent legitimate businesses by checking that people setting up new advertising accounts work for who they claim to”
The duty sits on the platform. The platform discharges it by checking you.
| What the headline says | What it means at your end |
|---|---|
| Ban accounts that post scam ads | Platforms need a way to tell a real trader from a fake one. Yours is the identity being tested. |
| Check advertisers work for who they claim to | Registered name, trading name, website and ad account all need to agree. |
| Verify financial advertisers against the FCA | Sell regulated financial products and your permissions get checked before the advert runs. |
| Test AI advert-generation tools | The AI ad tools inside the platforms get tighter, not looser. |
| Appeals for wrongly removed adverts | A route back exists. It costs you time you would rather spend selling. |
Why this lands hardest on the smallest firms
Ofcom says it plainly in its own overview. Loss of trust in advertisements undermines legitimate businesses, and those impacts, in Ofcom’s words, disproportionately affect smaller firms.
That is the part worth sitting with. You are already paying for scam adverts. Not in a fine, and not in compliance costs. You are paying in the fact that every advert you run is seen by people who have been burned before and now assume the worst.
Ofcom is not moving alone, either. The ASA scanned 60 million ads last year without waiting for a complaint. The direction is the same everywhere: identity and evidence, checked by machine, at scale.
The date that matters: 2 October 2026. That is when the consultation closes, not when anything starts. Ofcom expects to publish final decisions by mid-2027 at the latest, and the codes apply only once approved by Parliament.
What to actually do
None of this needs a budget. It is Start-stage work: get your identity straight before you spend another penny on reach.
1. Make your business identity agree with itself. Registered name at Companies House, trading name, website footer, ad account name, email domain. When we checked 64 UK tradespeople against Companies House, 19 could not be verified from what they published. Those are the businesses an automated check struggles with.
2. Advertise from an email on your own domain. A free webmail address attached to an advertising account is the cheapest possible signal that you might not be who you say you are. If you own a domain, you can almost certainly have an address on it.
3. Clean up your directory entries. We checked 100 UK directory listings against Companies House and 29 failed. A stale listing under an old company name is exactly the inconsistency an account check trips on.
4. If you sell regulated financial products, check your FCA permissions are current and match the legal entity named on the advertising account.
5. If you have a view, say so. The consultation is open to anyone until 2 October, not only to platforms. Small firms are the ones who carry the trust cost, and almost none of them will respond.
The takeaway
The businesses that sail through this will not be the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They will be the ones whose paperwork agrees with itself.
Structure before scale, as usual. The difference this time is that a regulator is doing the checking.
