Temu’s Meta Ad Campaign Faces EU Scrutiny Over Suspected Synthetic Creator Accounts

European digital regulators are facing pressure to investigate Temu after research found that roughly 73% of its 100 most active creator accounts in Meta Platforms Inc. ads across the European Union and the United Kingdom showed clear indicators of being artificial rather than authentic influencers.

Online Risk Labs (ORL), a Prague-based cybersecurity and systemic risk research non-profit, has submitted a formal dossier to EU regulators under the Digital Services Act (DSA). It is seeking a comprehensive risk assessment of Temu’s promotional network, focused on whether the algorithmic use of fictitious personas to drive purchases breaches European advertising transparency and fair trading requirements. ORL estimates that Temu directed up to $962 million into Meta partnership ads across the 27 EU member states and the U.K. during the 16 months ending in April 2026.

The scale of the campaign is visible in Meta’s Ad Library, a public database mandated by the DSA that records commercial campaigns delivered across the EU and the U.K. ORL found that from January 2025 to April 2026, Temu used 31 official company pages on Meta platforms to run more than 9 million individual ads. Together, they generated 134 billion impressions.

One prominent account, “@findgadgetswithme,” presents itself on Instagram as “Ya Lili” and has 183,000 followers. Its low-fidelity, AI-assisted product demonstrations link directly to Temu storefronts. Among the 100 accounts most active in Temu’s campaigns, only eight were identity-verified by Meta.

The DSA requires designated Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as Temu, to assess and mitigate systemic risks such as consumer manipulation and deceptive marketing formats. The European Commission designated Temu a VLOP in May 2024, bringing it under enhanced compliance standards and algorithmic audits.

ORL also found that 73% of the top accounts had changed their profile handles since creation; one had changed its name 15 times. Researchers described such changes as characteristic of disposable or hijacked accounts rather than established content creators. Vendula Prokůpková, ORL’s project manager, said legitimate creators made up no more than 15% to 20% of the top 100, citing substantial operational signs of synthetic networks originating outside the single market.

Partnership ads, which boost posts made by external accounts directly into users’ feeds, accounted for 65.8% of Temu’s ad inventory and 49.6% of its total European reach. Across the wider digital advertising industry, the format typically represents about 2% of a brand’s ad volume. In the first four months of 2026, Temu placed 74% of its European partnership ad volume through just 100 creator accounts, producing 16.9 billion impressions from 1.4 million separate ad deployments.

Meta’s ad registry located 28 of those 100 accounts in Russia, 19 in China and 34 in the United States, although the ads targeted consumers exclusively in Europe. Only six accounts originated in the EU or the U.K.; the others were registered in Bangladesh, Canada and Ghana.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act requires automated and AI-generated commercial content to be clearly labeled. In the U.K., the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act of 2024 gives enforcement authorities enhanced powers to penalize deceptive marketing, including fake endorsements and misidentified commercial entities. Under both legal systems, presenting an artificial or non-existent profile as a real person making an independent recommendation is misleading commercial conduct. Stuart Lester, a partner leading the advertising and marketing law practice at Mishcon de Reya in London, said statutory provisions in the U.K. and across the European bloc prohibit creating fake individual accounts to carry commercial messages.

The network behind “@findgadgetswithme” also operates the Facebook page “Must good,” which has 129,000 followers. Its platform metadata gives its location as “England, Birmingham, MO, United States”; the page lists a Chinese contact email address and the bio text “You are my dream of dead.” Over 16 months, content from this single entity appeared in 109,541 distinct Temu ad campaigns—about 225 a day—and accumulated more than 1 billion views.