Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that UK citizens are protected from online fraud and social media and text messaging scams.

Under the Online Safety Act regulatory framework, online platforms are required to take steps to reduce the risk their services are used to facilitate fraud, scams and other illegal activity. These duties have started to take effect on services. Ofcom is the regulator and has powers to enforce against non-compliance.

Government and industry are also currently developing a second Telecoms Charter. Under the first Telecommunications Charter, telecoms operators introduced firewalls that have stopped more than 1 billion scam text messages since January 2022. The Government will also ban “SIM farms”, devices used to send out scam texts to thousands of people at once.