Nearly two-thirds of people who acted on financial tips from social media now wish they hadn’t. New research from TSB, surveying almost 2,000 UK adults, found that 59% of people who followed financial advice they encountered on social media went on to regret doing so. The bank’s study looked at how people are using and misusing online financial guidance.
Roughly a third of those surveyed had acted on financial advice from social media within 2024-2025. Of that group, more than half, 56%, ended up losing money, a small rise on the previous year’s figure of 55%, with those affected losing an average of almost £700. Younger people were the most likely to act on what they saw online. Among 25 to 34 year olds, 49% had followed social media financial tips in the past year, mostly around savings and investments, compared with far fewer over-55s.
The losing money part is no wonder, considering another recent study, which revealed that 75% of the most-watched investing videos on TikTok were misleading. At the same time, the proportion carrying no risk warning rose from 30% to 60% between September 2025 and April 2026.
What makes this year’s findings different is the AI angle. A quarter of respondents had turned to AI tools for financial advice, a share that climbs to 43% among 25 to 34 year olds. On the surface, that looks like people moving away from unreliable finfluencers toward something more systematic. But the same survey found a problem hiding underneath that shift: over half, 51%, admitted they lacked confidence in their ability to tell whether financial content had been generated by AI in the first place.
People aren’t necessarily getting better at judging financial advice. They’re just changing where they get it from. Trading an unverified social media post for an unlabelled AI-generated one doesn’t close the gap between how much people trust content and how well they can check it. Separately, almost half of respondents, 46%, said they wouldn’t know how to verify the credentials of someone offering investment advice online. Such a disconnect between confidence in content and the ability to scrutinise its source is fairly disturbing.
At the same time, a separate UK research found that the share of people using AI for financial advice is much higher than TSB suggests. A STRAT& study found that over half of those surveyed resort to artificial intelligence for their financial questions. Moreover, 81% of Gen Z and 80% of Millennials using AI platforms for financial advice do so at least sometimes, with around 14% of Gen Z relying on AI for all of their financial questions.
Regulators are already treating this as an enforcement problem rather than just a media literacy one. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has led coordinated international action against unauthorised finfluencers, and in its most recent operation it identified 1,267 illegal financial adverts reaching a minimum of 2,338,372 UK accounts, working alongside regulators in markets including Australia, Canada and the UAE. That scale of enforcement shows how far social platforms have moved beyond word-of-mouth tips into mass financial promotion. The content moderation policy alone hasn’t kept pace with this scale.
For regulated banks and finance apps, this gap is also an opening. If people are already looking for an alternative to unverifiable social posts, a bank or fintech that can visibly label AI-generated guidance, attach it to a named source, or route it through a genuinely regulated adviser has something social media and anonymous chatbots can’t offer: a paper trail. TSB’s own advice for now is simpler: check claims independently before acting, and treat “get rich quick” promises as a warning sign rather than an opportunity.
