Big tech must pay fair share in fight against scammers

What if the key to fighting scams lay in the parable of the blind men and the elephant? In the story, a group of blind men each inspect an elephant by touch. One holds the creature’s trunk and says it must be a snake, while another touches its leg and insists it’s a tree. A third grabs the animal’s tail and claims he’s got a piece of rope, and the last man presses its side and concludes they’ve hit a wall.

The elephant is a symbol of the growing scams epidemic, and the men are all the different industries trying to make sense of it.

The United Kingdom is now seen by many as a global centre for fraud, with authorised push payment scams (which is when victims are tricked into making a payment to a fraudster) reaching a record high of £538.2m in 2021, according to figures from UK Finance. In a world where so much of what we do is online, criminals are adapting to an ever-evolving digital environment and finding new ways to defraud innocent victims.

In fact, Barclays’ most recent data shows that most scams (77pc) happen on tech platforms such as social media, purchase/auction sites, or dating apps.

It’s easy to assume that scams only involve three parties – scammers, their victims, and banks – but in reality there are a number of sectors involved.

And as scams occur across many different sectors, they’re becoming increasingly more difficult to track and have oversight of: for example, when a victim first receives a text message from a scammer, this will be enabled by a telecom service.

If they then click on the fraudulent link contained within the text, it is facilitated by an internet service provider. If a customer engages with a criminal posting on social media, this will be hosted by a tech firm.

Finally, when the victim parts with their funds – experiencing a monetary loss – it will be their bank that attempts to block these transactions or return their money.

Despite the vast array of touchpoints where the scammer and victim interact, it is currently just banks, at this final step, that offer policymakers and law enforcement enough insight into scams and how to tackle this problem.

We propose a solution: all companies and sectors involved in enabling scams – including large tech firms – should be mandated to regularly publish their data, including what preventative actions they are taking. Policymakers, regulators and stakeholders across all industries need this data to understand how and where scams are occurring. Without this we’re blind and won’t be able to coordinate a better response.

If we work together to communicate our data and insights seamlessly, we’ll be able to see the bigger picture – not just disparate bits and pieces that don’t make sense alone.

Having said all this, we strongly believe that the reimbursement of victims is just as important as scam prevention.

This is why we would like a crosssector pot to be established to fund the reimbursement of victims, based on a “polluter pays” principle by which those companies that enable scams to occur on their platforms or services should provide funding for the pot.

Ultimately, the government, regulators and all sectors need to come together as part of a collaborative effort to tackle this shared problem at its very source.

We’re all victims of scammers, and we will never be able to eliminate this epidemic unless we work together to collectively protect individuals, businesses and the economy as a whole. Scammers might be smart. But together, we can be smarter.