Businesses must step up their defences against scammers​​​​​​​: Rocio Concha

To the above, we can add ‘£3 laptops’, loans for apparently dead uncles, and fake emails purportedly from billionaires, offering free cash giveaways – no strings attached.

While some scam attempts may provoke a smirk, the reality for victims ensnared by this terrible crime is anything but funny.

Take, for instance, a fraudster who managed to infiltrate an email chain between a solicitor and house buyer, convincing them to send tens of thousands of pounds to the wrong bank account. Those who fall victim don’t just lose money, but suffer a psychological toll, too.

So, in 2025, businesses that make up vital cogs in the fraud machine – social media giants, banks and payment providers and telecoms firms – that do so much to enable and facilitate scammers, should make it their new year’s resolution to strengthen their defences.

How might they go about that in practice?

For banks and payment providers, it means stepping up and meeting a set of new mandatory reimbursement requirements. These rules, which came into force in early October, should mean that victims of bank transfer fraud get their money back if they were not at fault.

The rules could be a gamechanger, bringing to an end years of reimbursement lotteries depending on which firm innocent victims banked with. New rules will hopefully incentivise banks/payment firms – both sending and receiving – to do more to prevent consumers being duped in the first place.

For online platforms, where we know the bulk of scams originate, the key is stopping fraud at source.

If a tech giant can quickly remove a fraudulent advertisement, extolling the virtues of a bogus cryptocurrency get-rich-quick scheme purportedly condoned by a famous celebrity, so that it never makes its way onto a platform or is removed very quickly, the pool of users who may see and believe it will remain low.

Alternatively, if the ad is up and allowed to remain on the site for days or weeks, there’s no telling how much damage it could do to users.

The Online Safety Act will give online platforms a responsibility to remove this content, and as part of those laws the communications regulator Ofcom will have the power to hand down multi-million pound fines to firms that fall short of the required standard.

However, Ofcom must speed up the timetable for implementing these directives as, they may not fully come into force until 2027 – leaving consumers vulnerable for longer.

Fraudsters are exploiting an increasingly digital world, which means that scams often include more than one platform – capturing a victim on a social network and then requesting they make a bank transfer, for example.

That means for all firms involved in the fraud chain, better and more collaborative sharing of intelligence on how scammers operate is required.

There are some early signs of encouragement. Banks and telcos have recently teamed up to analyse real-time data from mobile networks to identify links between phone calls and fraudulent bank transfers to hone in on fraud hotspots. Collaboration like this is vital to strengthening fraud prevention.

Tackling fraud will not be done by one sector alone.

The Government must bring together departments that for too long have worked in siloes tackling fraud. Its Fraud Minister should publish a meaningful fraud strategy as a matter of urgency, bringing together the tech, banking and telecoms sectors to better protect consumers. The consequence of inaction means more misery for victims.