Keep safe when you go online
Social media platforms have a duty to protect their users from scammers, says Matt Allwright
Illustrator Neil Webb
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Let’s imagine you’ve got a wallet containing not money but your attention. You can spend that showing your kids the love they need, watching them on the swings or sitting down together for a meal. You can spend that on work, or on improving the world or your own situation.
Or of course, you can use it to scroll through your social media feed, being alternately charmed and shocked. The point to remember is that you only get given so much attention every day, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.
This is the attention economy, and we need to wake up to the fact that how we spend our time is every bit as important as how we spend our money. Why else would social media platforms have spent the last two decades engineering the perfect way to capture and direct our eyeballs in such a ruthlessly effective way?
Answer: because the tech guys wish it. They want to take our attention and keep it for as long as possible. That gives them the power to influence our choices – how we feel, how we vote, who we hate and what we buy. The problem is that their incredible skill to keep me on my phone isn’t matched by the same skill to keep me safe, particularly from fraudsters.
Matt Allwright. bb
Social media is a gift for scam artists. Previously, they had to rely on inefficient leaflets through the door, cold calls or adverts in the phone directories to get your attention. Now scams are mixed into an irresistible Eton mess of family photos, kittens, car crashes and bungee jumps. It’s all so tasty, until you realise that someone is running up debts using your name, your bank account is being drained, or the thing you paid for doesn’t turn up.
These are the stories I hear every day from Watchdog viewers – with social media now being the most likely starting point for their misery – with little or no hope of getting their money back. Fraud in the UK is rapidly shifting online, with around 70 per cent of authorised payment scams starting via digital channels. In 2022, TSB revealed that nearly 80 per cent of purchase fraud cases reported by its customers took place on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The platforms could do better. Several times a day, a clever social media algorithm accurately predicts the make and colour of trainers I’d like, and then bombards me with ads for them. Scams haven’t essentially changed in years, yet our tech bros don’t seem to use this predictive genius to stop them.
Around 70 per cent of payment scams start via digital channels
Whenever we highlight a social media scam on Watchdog, the tech response feels reactive rather than proactive. They’ll say that user safety is their priority but that they are a third party in the transaction, and bear no financial responsibility for buyers’ transactions. And legally, that’s true. But for me, that’s like saying yes, I served the Sunday lunch that made you ill, but I didn’t breed the chicken so it’s not my fault. They will take down the offending post or ad, but it’s probably already up in 17 different forms anyway, so business as usual, and everyone still gets paid, except of course the target of the scam.
There is some good news – the Online Safety Act, which will order tech platforms to protect us better by tackling criminal activity on their platforms, should be in place next year. But I worry about how adept at dodging regulations the scammers are. Using the law to bring them in line might be akin to putting up road signs to stop a charging rhino.
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Scam Safe Week, our campaign to tie in with Black Friday, will raise awareness about financial cons – off and online – to help people recognise, avoid and report them. At least the new legislation, when it comes into force, will acknowledge that a platform that’s built to hold and retain our attention has a responsibility for how that is used and, crucially, abused. MATT ALLWRIGHT
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