Social Media: Scam Adverts and Fraudulent Content

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that. The Government have already signed a United Nations resolution against fraud, and we are hosting a conference in Vienna in March next year to try to bring together international action on the very issues that my noble friend has mentioned. Independently, I went to Nigeria in April this year and signed an agreement with the Nigerian Government on fraud and scammers, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister has done one with Vietnam recently, and we intend to expand that further to other key nations. It is vital that we have international co-operation to tackle areas where scammers are operating from, very often against the will of the host Government.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, fraud is not falling, despite all the efforts that have been put into it so far. The National Crime Agency estimates that 67% of fraud is cyber-enabled. It says:

“Social media platforms are a key facilitator of authorised push payments frauds”.


Social media platforms and telecoms are the main route by which fraud comes to this country from overseas scammers, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. At the moment, banks pick up the full cost of reimbursing fraud victims. Banks have a key role in preventing fraud but they are not the facilitators of it. Surely the time has come to make social media platforms and telecom companies pay their share of the losses that people suffer as a result of their facilitation of fraud.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. He is absolutely right that the banks are effectively subsidising fraud results and are leading to the repayment of an amount of the fraud that is taking place. He is also right that a large portion of that fraud, which is around 44% of all crime, goes through telecommunication companies. We recently established a brand new fraud charter with telecom companies, which I believe will reduce fraud via telephone communication significantly over the next 12 months. In the fraud strategy we will discuss the potential for reducing fraud through telecommunications platforms and through platforms such as Meta/Facebook and others, which are a significant gateway to fraud. The noble Lord is absolutely right, but I will have to reflect on those matters as part of the forthcoming fraud strategy.