Banks Demand Tech Giants Share Financial Burden of Scam Advertisements
Social media companies are facing intensified pressure to help fund the fight against online fraud as the United Kingdom prepares to release its updated national fraud strategy. The Payments Association has issued a strong call for platforms such as Meta Platforms and X to assume greater responsibility for scam advertisements that proliferate on their sites.
Profiting from Fraud While Banks Pay the Price
The industry group argues that while these technology giants profit from advertising revenue, banks and payment firms bear the majority of costs when fraud occurs. The association is urging government ministers to extend the UK's economic crime levy to include social media and telecommunications companies, compelling them to contribute financially to combating online fraud.
This push comes ahead of the government's refreshed national fraud strategy, which is expected to be published imminently. Scam advertisements, frequently employing artificial intelligence tools to impersonate trusted brands, have surged across social media feeds and search results in recent years. These deceptive ads typically promote counterfeit goods or fraudulent services designed to extract payments or personal data from unsuspecting consumers.
Alarming Statistics on Scam Advertisement Exposure
Research cited by the association reveals that UK shoppers now encounter approximately 185 scam advertisements each month on average across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and X. The financial impact continues to escalate, with Juniper Research showing UK consumers lost £44 million to fake advertisement scams in 2025 alone, with projected losses expected to reach £84 million by 2030.
Most of these scams fall under the category of authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where victims are manipulated into voluntarily transferring money to criminals. Since October 2024, stricter consumer protection rules have mandated that payment service providers reimburse victims of APP fraud. Under this scheme, banks and payment firms have reimbursed approximately 87 percent of scam-related losses.
However, the Payments Association emphasizes that social media giants, where many scams originate, contribute nothing toward these reimbursements despite benefiting financially from the advertising ecosystem.
Substantial Revenue Generated from Fraudulent Advertising
Industry estimates suggest scam advertisements generated approximately £3.8 billion in social media advertising revenue in 2025, representing roughly ten percent of total platform advertising income. Riccardo Tordera Ricchi, vice president for policy and government relations at the Payments Association, stated: "Payment firms are expected to stop fraud at the point money is transferred when the real crime has been committed upstream, through digital communication and scam advertising."
He added: "It cannot be right that while social media platforms benefit from the revenue generated by online fraud, consumers and payment firms are left to pick up the bill for that crime."
Proposed Solutions and Shared Responsibility Framework
The group advocates for a "shared responsibility framework" where liability for economic crime is distributed across the ecosystem based on where the fraud originates. Under this proposal, technology platforms would help fund fraud prevention efforts alongside banks and payment companies.
The United Kingdom has become a primary target for scam advertising, with estimates suggesting the country generated 95 billion scam advertisement impressions in 2025, a figure projected to rise to 137 billion by 2030.
Beyond financial contributions, the Payments Association is calling on technology firms to strengthen advertiser verification processes and commit to the industry's online fraud charter. The group also seeks legislation enabling broader data sharing between payments firms, telecommunications operators, e-commerce platforms, and law enforcement agencies.
Proposed Fraud Detection Center and AI Challenges
The association has proposed establishing a UK digital payments fraud center—an independent hub utilizing artificial intelligence to detect fraud trends and coordinate responses across multiple sectors. This initiative comes as criminals increasingly employ AI to produce deepfakes, voice clones, and other convincing scam tools at scale, making fraud detection significantly more challenging.
Research from Mastercard revealed that organizations lost an average of $60 million (£45 million) to payment fraud last year, while global fraud losses exceeded $485 billion in 2023. Rachel Reeves has previously indicated that the government is examining whether technology and telecommunications companies should play a more substantial role in preventing online fraud.
For payment firms, the upcoming national fraud strategy may determine whether financial responsibility for combating online fraud is finally distributed more equitably across the digital ecosystem.
