A preliminary bill obliges Google, Twitter, Facebook and others to better prevent fraudulent advertisements. With these types of ‘ads’, scammers lure you to a fake survey that redirects you to a dangerous website.
‘This was not allowed to be shown on TV’, ‘This well-known Belgian became rich thanks to this tip’, ‘KLM is giving away free tickets’, these are just a few examples of advertisements that you have seen on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere in recent years. But, in practice, it is about fraud, and so data is stolen, or you are lured to a fraudulent investment or your bank account is looted.
Great Britain now wants to tackle this kind of scam more rigorously by penalizing the providers. From now on, tech companies must take stricter action and have systems to prevent and remove this. They risk being banned or fined up to £18 million or ten percent of their annual turnover if they don’t.
Reuters notes that such scams were on the rise during the corona crisis. In the UK, around £754 million is believed to have been stolen in the first half of 2021 via bank account scams.
The question is whether the tech companies will actually do more. In their own words, they already do a lot, although this is far too little in practice. For example, data News already contacted Twitter at the end of 2020 about some fraudulent advertisements. Then we were told that the company would take steps, but the ads kept popping up.
Facebook has also been using the same strategy for years: saying that it is being worked on, but in practice, the situation, certainly for non-English advertisements, hardly seems to improve.
