To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he plans to take to give online platforms a legal responsibility for preventing, identifying and removing content that leads to pensions scams from their sites.
Answered on
21 April 2021
The growth and scale of online pensions scams, and online fraud more broadly, is deeply concerning. The Government is working tirelessly with industry, regulators and consumer groups to tackle fraud. We are also considering additional legislative and non-legislative solutions to effectively address the harms posed by all elements of online fraud in a cohesive and robust way.
My Department is considering how online advertising is regulated through its Online Advertising Programme. This work will look at ensuring that standards about the placement and content of advertising are effectively applied and enforced online to reduce consumers’ exposure to harmful or misleading advertising. This work will look at the role advertising can play in enabling online fraud and help inform our future efforts to tackle it. We will be consulting on this issue later this year.