Union helpless towards Big Techów? Ireland calls for changes, Poland is skeptical

A group of EU member states presses on the European Commission to force Big Techy to take responsibility for the fight against investment fraud on their platforms. The initiative led by Ireland, however, encounters obstacles. Skeptical remains, among others Poland, which has its own idea.

The European Union is currently working on regulations that would be forced by companies such as PayPal and Visa and banks to automatically refund the money to customers cheated by cybercriminals. As reported by the Financial Times, as part of the payment services regulation, which is currently negotiated between EU countries, an amendment proposed by the Irish Ministry of Finance has just appeared.

The proposal of Ireland, which gains support from other countries, would oblige digital giants to verify the credibility of advertisers before the publication of their materials. As amended that the “Financial Times” saw, Advertisements of investment products in the European Union could only include registered financial service providers.

According to the latest EU statistics, scammers using professional ads urging users to provide their personal data, they deceived Europeans for the amount of EUR 4.3 billion in 2022. Bank of Ireland, the largest bank in the country and an intercession of Irish proposals for changes in regulations, states that over 75% of clients' losses last year resulted from investment fraud.

Poland unconvinced

According to the reports of the “Financial Times” unconvinced to the proposal reported by Ireland, Poland remains, which, currently exercising the presidency of the EU and is responsible for building a consensus around the law developed. Our country reported another idea consisting in:

Simplification of communication between payment service providers and platforms “, which would then” delete or block access to content related to the reported fraud.

Opponents of such a solution indicate that it would act after the fact and were ineffective and accuse officials of the lack of understanding of the nature of investment fraud and the existing gap in the regulations.

– When you report a fraud via social platforms, it is already after the fact – said Brian Hayes, president of Banking and Payments Federation Ireland, quoted by the “Financial Times” – the European Commission is trying to encourage clients to invest in financial markets … But if something like this happens to the consumer, he will be discouraged from investing forever.

CERT recommendations

Expansion of a team of Polish -language moderators, shortening the response time to applications or using a list of warnings (the same to which they use telecommunications suppliers to block the entries to malicious websites) are part of the proposals reported to META company by specialists from CERT Polska in December last year, whose goal would be to fight Facebook and Instagram more effective.

The organization has previously published a detailed report that explains how criminals use social networking sites to rob Poles. The link to the material was also posted on Facebook, which removed it shortly after the publication and restored only after Cert Polska protests.

“In order to verify, from January to November 2024 we tested the reporting of ads, which we considered a fraud from the standard Facebook user account. From 122 such malicious ads, only 10 were removed. More precisely, in 106 cases (86.8%) the notifications were closed with the status” we did not remove the advertisement “, in 10 cases the advertisement was removed, maneuverability ” – we read in the CERT report.

Advertisements of investment frauds on the web can be published on a massive scale, and then removed at any time (usually after damage). Their short life means that they will often not even be noticed by supervisory authorities. Meanwhile, digital giants allow fraudsters to publish new, similar ads only in a changed form.

In this way, the circle closes and despite subsequent social campaigns run by the PFSA and other institutions, the number of deceived people is constantly growing. The victims do not recover money in most cases.

Mm

Source: