Checkaco Consumer News: UK Finance call for £40 million levy on social media companies as consumers are scammed out of £1.2 bn a year
By Rupert Bridgwater: For years banks and consumer credit companies have made good losses incurred by victims of fraud and scams. Now a lenders' trade group UK Finance has along with its 300 members said they are fed up with reimbursing the losses to scammers and demanded social media companies pay a levy that will cover some of the costs they incur.
UK Finance is a business group that represents banks, payment companies and lenders. With an election ongoing they hope their lobbying for the Government’s online fraud charter agreed last year is backed up by legislation to make the likes of FaceBook and Google pay up. The group have issued a charter stating: “The next government must make online platforms, internet service providers and telecommunications companies work harder to stop fraudsters exploiting their systems and look at how these sectors can be made to contribute to the cost of fraud reimbursement. To expand resources for fighting fraud and economic crime online platforms, internet service providers and telecommunications companies could be brought into the scope of the economic crime levy. Doing so would raise over £40m a year to invest in better technology and recruit specialist officers and incentivise action to reduce fraud.”
UK Finance would like to see cross party support for laws that would enforce the payment of cash to help pay the cost of tackling economic crime and reimbursing victims of scammers. As it stands the banks in this country must reimburse customers stung by fraudsters. And in 2023 around £1.2 billion pounds was lost to fraud of which the banks paid £1 billion pounds to the victims of crime.
Pervis Chapel of Checkaco said: “The introduction of this law would force social media firms to tighten up their vetting of posts placed online. At the moments scammers are flooding the internet with fake adverts, get rich quick schemes and outright cons. If there is one policy all political parties can agree on in this election it’s this one – force social media platforms to police their sites and pay compensation when people are ripped off.”
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