Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to enhance cybersecurity infrastructure to help tackle phishing scams through (a) text messaging and (b) fake payment websites.

The Criminal Justice Bill will introduce a new offence of supplying or possessing “SIM farm” devices, which allow criminals to send scam texts to thousands of people at the same time, without good reason or undertaking adequate due diligence.

In addition, the Government and Industry have signed the Telecommunications Fraud Sector Charter, a voluntary agreement to improve counter-fraud efforts. Under the Telecommunications Charter, the sector has introduced firewalls that detect and stop scam texts from reaching customers. The firewalls have stopped 960million scam text messages since January 2022.

Furthermore, domain registrars, Internet infrastructure (IIPs) and service providers (ISPs) operate robust voluntary arrangements for filtering, blocking and takedown of malicious websites, which is supported by the operational work of our agencies and law enforcement. NCSC also works in collaboration with industry partners to present ISPs with real-time threat data that enables them to instantly block access to known fraudulent or malicious websites. This has a major impact in protecting citizens from cyber- and cyber-facilitated crimes.

Where voluntary arrangements prove unsuccessful, we are introducing a new legislative power will provide law enforcement and investigative agencies with a formal process to suspend IP addresses and domain names that are being used to facilitate serious crime. This power will also be introduced as part of the Criminal Justice Bill.