Meta's anti-scam campaign reaches 303 million people
Meta says its One Step Ahead campaign, run across 18 Asia-Pacific markets with more than 25 partners, has reached 303 million people since May.
Meta published progress figures for its One Step Ahead anti-scam education campaign on 29 September 2026. The campaign runs across 18 markets in Asia-Pacific and was built with more than 25 local government agencies, law enforcement bodies and safety organisations. Since launching in May 2026, Meta says it has reached more than 303 million people, delivered over 1.3 billion impressions and generated 1.2 million link clicks towards safer accounts.
The campaign is designed to send people to trusted local information rather than to Meta's own help pages. It also promotes the security features already available on Meta's apps: two-factor authentication, which means a stolen password is not enough on its own; passkeys, which cannot be shared, guessed or reused; Device Link Warnings on WhatsApp, which alert users to suspicious login attempts, unauthorised web clients and account-linking scams; and group privacy settings that decide who can add someone to a WhatsApp group.
Twenty-five partners and a shared referral list
The partner list is the substantive part of the announcement. Those who see the campaign are pointed to national reporting bodies rather than a generic form, including Scamwatch, operated by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission; India's national cyber crime reporting portal; Indonesia's Anti-Scam Centre alongside the Cyber Crime Directorate of the national police; the Singapore Police Force and National Crime Prevention Council; Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau; and agencies in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Meta describes the campaign principles as safety advice that is practical, easy to act on, and comes from a source people trust. It says One Step Ahead will continue through 2026, with further locally tailored resources and additional partnerships to come.
Our opinion
Read the numbers carefully. One point two million link clicks against one point three billion impressions is a click-through rate of roughly 0.09 per cent, and reach in an advertising sense counts people who saw a placement, not people who did anything about it. That is not a failure for an awareness campaign, but it is a long way from the behaviour change the framing implies, and Meta is presenting a distribution metric as an outcome.
The more consequential question is why the burden sits with the user at all. Two-factor authentication and passkeys are effective, but a campaign that teaches a 303 million-strong audience to spot scams is treating the symptom of a platform where scammers can still reach them cheaply at scale. The single most useful thing in this announcement is the partner referral list, because routing someone to their own national police force the moment they realise they have been defrauded is a concrete change in what happens next. Everything else is reach, and reach has never been the scarce thing.