Big technology company should reimburse those who fall victim to scams on their platforms, according to a group of MPs.
In its report on Economic Crime, the Treasury Committee called on the government to crack down on fraudulent adverts and urgently legislate to make reimbursement for victims of ‘authorised push payment fraud’ mandatory.
The report recommended that the government consider whether a single law enforcement agency with a clear responsibility to fight economic crime would be more effective.
It also called for proper regulation to protect consumers from fraud and money laundering in the cryptoasset industry.
"For too long, pernicious scammers have acted with impunity, ripping off innocent consumers with fraudulent online adverts, impersonation scams and dodgy crypto investments," said Mel Stride MP, chair of the Treasury Committee.
"Unfortunately, fraud has soared during the pandemic, and as MPs we’ve heard heart-breaking stories of individuals who have fallen victim to these criminals and lost large sums of money."
He urged the government to "push harder and act faster" on the growing fraud epidemic.
While banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in, Stride told Reuters.
"Online platforms are hosting this stuff, not really putting enough effort into weeding it out, and indeed financially benefiting because they're getting the advertising revenues," he said.
The report noted that the trade body TechUK, which represents major tech companies in Britain, in December said Meta (Facebook), Twitter and Microsoft had committed to requiring potential financial services advertisers to be authorised by the the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), following similar steps taken by Google, TikTok and Amazon .
But the report noted that there was no set timeline for these changes and other major online platforms have not followed suit.
"We think the government's been too slow in various areas to really catch up with it... it's people being, quietly in many cases, defrauded of large amounts of money, people losing life savings," Stride said.