Closed petition Extend the Online Safety Bill’s protections against online scams

Closed on 14 November 2021

Online platforms, such as search engines and social media sites, should be given a legal responsibility to protect users from fake and fraudulent content hosted or promoted on their sites that lead to scams.

The Online Safety Bill is currently set to make online platforms responsible for tackling fraud where a user of the platform shares a message or a post as part of the scam, but not fraud via online adverts or emails. Since the start of the pandemic, I've noticed a significant increase in fraudulent emails and text messages. According to Action Fraud figures, £1.7 billion was lost to scams in the past year, while estimates for the year to June 2020 reveal that 85% of all fraud was cyber-enabled.