Martin Lewis, Citizens Advice and Facebook launch major initiatives to fight scam ads - MSE News

I don’t understand why the ads are not screened before being accepted. Just last week they were still using your photo Martin! Facebook basically taking the !!!! I think £3m is nothing to them obviously. Hope this new initiative helps stop this exploitation.

Seriously unimpressive way of dealing with the slime out there: reporting should be a 2 minute online task, whereas having confronted the thousands of words comprising the Citizens' Advice Bureau 'alert' facility, I've almost lost the will to live.

All you need is a box in which to insert the url of the scam site and then further boxes within which to enter your own details (if you so wish). Instead, CAB is all about pointless verbiage, on and on and on.

Reporting of scam sites needs to be as fast as the speed at which they're being put together, because only that way will the slime behind them be discouraged.

Currently, online scammeres are finding it necessary to invest more and more time and money into increasingly complex scam sites because of the way their original efforts have been so extensively undermined by hostile publicity. No longer can a single pretence be sustained: the attempted fraud has to be complex in order to be persuasive.

Latest scam (time consuming though it must have been to put it together) is a fake copy of a genuine newspaper website, with an entirely fake "news report" on that website about some celeb or other whose name may resonate favourably with he dumb or the gullible out there (of whom there seem to be hundreds of thousands.) If, as in this case, the report can be presented as a report-of-a-report-from-somewhere-else, so much the better.

An come-on ad on The Spectator's home page links to this triple layer scam involving, without their knowledge or their consent, the Daily Mirror, ITV's 'This Morning', and so-called 'celebrity chef' Gordon Ramsay.

The scammers have failed to obfuscate their url so the 'Mirror' page opens on https://better-news.live/lps/UKmirrRam/?sxid=8guwf441i4jo (note: obviously, this url is criminally fraudulent and mentioned here only as an example of the lengths to which scammers are now going in their attempts to appear credible).

Moving in quickly on the slime behind better-news live is obviously the way to go but as long as what passes for consumer protection in the UK rests largely in the blundering amateurish hands of the CAB, then there's not much hope there.