Martin Lewis x Which? scam ads letter to the Prime Minister

MSE_Emily

MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE) and consumer group Which? have today (Tuesday 19 May) sent a joint letter to the Prime Minister highlighting the Government's repeated, ongoing, flaccid treatment of scam adverts…

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Martin Lewis x Which? scam ads letter to the Prime Minister

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born_again

How is the government supposed to police the internet. Many of these sites are hosted through small hosting companies, in foreign countries, which UK has no power over.

Yes the likes of Facebook & other social media co should take action, even after reporting these companies, they say there is nothing wrong with them.

Expecting Gov to do anything is expecting a lot when they have no power over non UK companies.

Ectophile

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82005863#Comment_82005863

It's not that simple. If the company is doing business in the UK, then that makes them vulnerable to legal action in the UK. Most of these companies will have a UK office.

born_again

The vast majority of issues we see round Christmas time are from companies that spring up on social media having no ties to UK & hosted on Shopify (Canadian co) or other site.

Yes if a company has a UK presence, then action should be taken. Would be Trading Std, but as we know their funding is cut to the bone as they are locally funded. When it should be national funding.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82006166#Comment_82006166

Think you are missing the point that the letter is in relation to Big Tech platforms not the individuals doing the actual scamming… so no the company in China advertising their closing down sale of "Betties Boutique London" does not have a UK office or presence despite the name but they are attracting customer with adds on X and Facebook which do have UK presence. X and Facebook are often being paid to put adverts out for Betties Boutique London and therefore are profiting from the UK people being scammed. An Shopify who do have a UK presence too are profiting from hosting the shop.

They arent targeting the scammers, they are targeting those who are selling the tools the scammers are using.

Ergates

They arent targeting the scammers, they are targeting those who are selling the tools the scammers are using.

This. Facebook's (et al) complete lack of action on the widespread fraud committed on their platform makes them complicit in that fraud.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82006218#Comment_82006218

Personally I think we have to differentiate between the proactively stopping ads and responding to ads that are reported.

On the former I think it would be really difficult to do, certainly well beyond my skill sets and I can imagine there is significant concern over false positives (eg banning the NSPCC advert because it talks of child abuse).

On the later I do wonder what volume of reports they get and how realistic it is to manage them, even this site doesnt take down every post raised as spam and only automatically takes down a post after 5 such reports. Much of MSE moderation is done by volunteers and can't see X being able to get the thousands of volunteers required to moderate the 500m new posts every day.

Ergates

On one hand, I agree that it will be difficult to do. On the other hand: tough.

Facebook (well, Meta) makes over $60 billion in profits a year, making the lizard man one of the wealthiest "people" on the planet. They don't need to rely on volunteers to carry this work out - they can pay people to do it.

Obviously this will never actually happen, because these companies have always put maximizing profitability above all other concerns. So spending any amount of money to prevent their users from getting ripped off is just crazy talk. Moreover, by their own internal reports - about 10% of their annual ad revenue comes from these scam ads.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82006320#Comment_82006320

If you make the standards too high then you are only left with the likes of Meta because your medium sizes enterprise can't achieve the same on the £6,000 profit rather than the $60bn