Facebook Slammed For Loans Ads

The owners of social networking site Facebook have been criticised for allowing advertisements for loans and credit cards which allegedly flout UK guidelines to go online.

This is the claim of Charity Action, which has analysed adverts carried on the site and discovered several breaches in Office of Fair Trading rules.

Commonly, these advertisements ignored the requirement to display the APR of loans and also to provide the name of the loan provider.

Firms such as Payday and My Payday Online were cited by the group as particular offenders.

In response, Charity Action has now launched a Facebook group in order for users to submit further examples of illegal loan adverts, VNUnet.com reports.

"If you have been on Facebook recently, you cannot have missed the ads for 'payday loans' and credit cards," the charity advised.

"What you may not have realised is that many of these ads are breaking the law. There are strict rules on how credit can be advertised in the UK, and a lot of these do not measure up."

According to figures from data firm Alexa, Facebook is currently the eighth most visited website in the world receiving more visitors than Blogger.com and Yahoo! respectively.